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April 30, 2024

‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’: CounterSpin interview with Sally Dworak-Fisher on delivery workers

Janine Jackson interviewed the National Employment Law Project’s Sally Dworak-Fisher about delivery workers for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Less than four months after it came into effect, Seattle is looking to “adjust”—as it’s being described—the app-based worker minimum-payment ordinance calling on companies like Uber and DoorDash to improve labor conditions for employees.

Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson described the ordinance’s impact on the local economy as “catastrophic.” The Seattle Times reports that the “whiplash reversal comes as both drivers and businesses complained about the added cost of delivery, largely in the form of service charges added by the companies in the wake of the new law”—”in the wake of” being the load-bearing language here.

Common Dreams (3/28/24)

The story of a recent piece by our next guest is in its headline: “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It.” So here to help us break down what’s going on is Sally Dworak-Fisher, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She joins us now by phone from Baltimore City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sally Dworak-Fisher.

Sally Dworak-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Though more and more people are taking on gig work—for reasons largely to do with the conditions of non-gig work—I think it’s still safe to say that more mainstream news media consumers use app-based delivery systems than work for them. And reporters know what they’re doing when they explain this story by saying, for instance, “Companies like DoorDash have implemented regulatory fees in response to the new law, causing the cost of orders to go up.” What’s being skipped over in that formulation, or that explanation, of what’s happening here, that there was a new law and now costs have gone up? What’s missing there?

SD: Sure. Well, it’s not a surprise that companies might choose to pass on some percentage of new costs to consumers, but they’re by no means required to, and compliance with bedrock pay standards, or any workplace law or social safety net, is part of running a business. If you need to charge a certain amount so you can pay your employee a minimum wage, you don’t normally issue a receipt that says, this is due to the minimum wage law. The practice of specifically pointing the finger at some new law seems really designed to make customers angry at the law, and pit them against the workers. It’s a business choice, it’s not a requirement.

And businesses could choose to, for instance, not pass on the entire cost of the law, or not pass on any of it, if they can afford to do that within their profit margin. So this particular situation, where customers are getting receipts that, in effect, blame the law, seems like a play to pit workers and consumers against one another.

JJ: Absolutely. In your piece that I saw in Common Dreams, you note that charging new service fees is an effort to “tank consumer demand and available work.” What are you getting at there? Why would a company want to draw down consumer demand, and then, more specifically, why would they want to lessen available work?

SD: My point there was just that, in so doing, they can also again create an outcry, a backlash, with workers themselves also saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working as intended. We need to change it.” But, really, it’s a manufactured crisis, and it’s not the law that’s to blame there. It’s really the policy of the business that’s to blame.

JJ: And we don’t see media, at least that I’ve seen, digging into that kind of elision, that kind of skip.

Seattle Times (4/26/24)

SD: Another interesting thing to note would be, so they add a $5 fee that’s purportedly because of the new legal requirements. But it’ll be interesting to know how much of that fee from all those people is really going through the compliance, versus how much is going to profit. And their data is not easily shared.

JJ: And I wanted to ask you about that data. Companies are saying these new service charges are a necessary counterbalance to increased labor costs. Though according to, at least, the Seattle Times, they have declined to release internal data. So we’re being asked to trust the very companies that fought tooth and nail against this ordinance, against paying workers more. We’re just supposed to trust their explanation of what the impact of that ordinance has been. That is, as you say, an information deficit there.

SD: Yes, and I think that they closely guard their information, and don’t turn it over to policymakers. It’s sort of shadow-boxing, in a way, because they have all the information. So I would hope that policymakers would make them show their work, in effect.

JJ: Or at least make a point of the fact that they’re not; that they’re making assertions based on something that they’re not proving or illustrating. We can call that out.

SD: And that was part of our point, is that this law has only gone into effect two months ago. Just be cognizant of the fact that this is a choice that the companies are making to raise these service fees. And before you go about rushing to judgment on anything, demand the data, and see what’s going on.

CounterSpin (4/3/20)

JJ: When I spoke with Bama Athreya, who hosts the podcast the Gig, she was saying that there’s a glaring need for a bridge between labor rights advocates and digital rights advocates. Because these companies, they’re not making toasters. Their business model is crucial here, and part of that involves, in fact, data, and that, beyond our regular understanding of workers’ rights, there needs to be a bigger-picture understanding of this new way of doing business.

SD: That dovetails with something that we talk about frequently here, which is the algorithmic control and the gamification of the work. These corporations are really well-versed in touting flexibility, but the day-to-day job of an app-based worker is highly mediated, monitored, controlled by algorithms that detail how much they’ll be paid, when they’ll be paid, when they can work. There’s a whole lot of algorithms and tech that come into play here. But I do just want to say, it doesn’t make them special. These are just new ways of misclassifying workers as independent contractors.

JJ: It’s just a new shine on an old practice.

Another thing that Bama Athreya pointed out was that it’s often presented to us as, “Well, I guess you’re going to have to pay $26 for a cup of coffee, because the workers want to get paid more.” And that’s the pitting workers versus consumers angle that a lot of elite media take.

Intercept (1/7/22)

But also, if we look at other countries, companies like Uber say, “Well golly, if you make us improve our labor practices, I guess we’ll have to”—and then they kick rocks and look sad—“I guess we’ll just have to go out of business.” And then a government says, “Well, yeah, OK, but you still have to follow the law.” And then they say, “Oh, all right, we’ll just follow it.” They can do it.

SD: And I think they’ve admitted that. I believe that the Uber CEO, after California passed AB 5, which is a law regarding who’s an employee and who’s an independent contractor in that state, Uber, I’m pretty sure, was on record saying, “Well, we can comply with any law.”

And, honestly, I think that really gets into, what do we as a society want in terms of our policies? Do we want just any business? Don’t we have minimum wage laws for a reason? If you can’t make it work while still paying a living wage, then consumers aren’t in the business of subsidizing that. I’m sorry, but not every business is entitled to run on the lowest wage possible.

JJ: And I wish a lot of the folks were not saying, out of the same mouth, that capitalism is this wonderful thing where if you build a better mousetrap, then you succeed, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. And that’s why they have to be rewarded, because of the risk they take. When then, at the same time, we’re saying, oh, but if you want to fall afoul of certain basic human rights laws, we’ll subsidize that, and make sure you get to exist anyway. It’s a confusing picture.

SD: I mean, should we bring back child labor?

JJ: Yeah. Hmm. You thought that would be a less interesting question than it turns out that it is.

Let me just ask you, finally, what should we be looking for to happen from public advocates, which we would hope elected officials would be public advocates, and also reporters we would hope would be public advocates. What should they be calling for, and what should they notice if it doesn’t happen? What’s the right move right now?

Sally Dworak-Fisher: “Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor.”

SD: I think whatever can be done to support the movement. There’s movements across states of app-based workers demanding accountability, and really trying to shine a light on what’s really going on here. I think the more reporting on that, and exposing—you know, every worker should have flexibility and a good job, but the flexibility that’s offered app-based workers is not necessarily the flexibility that a regular reader might assume.

In 2018, NELP issued a report with another organization, called Uber State Interference, and we really identified these ways that Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor. And now, coming out of the pandemic, as workers are successfully organizing again, like they’ve been doing in Seattle and New York City and Minneapolis, the companies are orchestrating a backlash. So understanding the context of what’s going on, and exposing it, would go a long way in solidarity with the workers.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sally Dworak-Fisher from the National Employment Law Project; they’re online at NELP.org. And her piece, “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It,” can be found at CommonDreams.org. Thank you so much, Sally Dworak-Fisher, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

SD: A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.

The post ‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’: CounterSpin interview with Sally Dworak-Fisher on delivery workers appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 29, 2024

‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’: CounterSpin interview with Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine

Janine Jackson interviewed Sam, representative from National Students for Justice in Palestine, for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

National Students for Justice in Palestine

Janine Jackson: There is a long and growing list of US college campuses where encampments and other forms of protests are going on, in efforts to get college administrations to divest their deep and powerful resources from weapons manufacturers, and other ways and means of enabling Israel’s war on Palestinians, assaults that have killed some 34,000 people just since the Hamas attack of October 7.

One key group on campuses has been SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s not a new, hastily formed group; they’ve been around and on the ground for decades.

We’re joined now by Sam, a representative of National Students for Justice in Palestine. Welcome to CounterSpin.

Sam: Thank you for having me.

Middle East Eye (4/8/24)

JJ: I can only imagine what a time this is for you, but certainly a time when the need for your group is crystal clear. Individuals who want to speak up about the genocide in Palestine are helped by the knowledge that there are other people with them, behind them, but also that there are organizations that exist to support them and their right to speak out. I wonder, is that maybe especially true for students, whose rights exist on paper, but are not always acknowledged in reality?

S: Yes and no. I think a lot of people definitely want to support students, because what we’re doing is very visible, and also I think people are more willing to assume good faith from 20-year-olds. At the same time, also, free speech on college campuses, especially private campuses, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. So if you’re on a campus, that means that it is sometimes harder to speak out, especially because we’re seeing students getting suspended, and when they get suspended, they get banned from campus, they get evicted from their student housing, sometimes they lose access to healthcare. And, basically, the schools control a lot more of students’ lives than any institution does for adults in the workforce, for example.

JJ: Right. So what are you doing day to day? You’re at National SJP, and folks should know that there are hundreds of entities on campuses, but what are you doing? How do you see your job right now?

S: SJP is a network of chapters that work together. It’s not like they’re branches, where we are giving them orders; they have full autonomy to do what they want within this network.

So what we’re doing is what we’ve been trying to do for our entire existence, which is act as a hub, act as a resource center, provide resources to students, connect them with each other, offer advice, offer financial support when we can. One thing we’re really trying to do is pull everything together, basically present a consistent narrative to the public around this movement.

New York Times (4/29/24)

JJ: Speaking of narrative, the claim that anyone voicing anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian ideas is antisemitic is apparently convincing for some people whose view of the world comes through the TV or the newspaper. But it’s an idea that is blown apart by any visit to a student protest. It’s just not a true thing to say. And I wonder what you would say about narratives. It’s obviously about work, supporting people, but on the narrative space, what are you trying to shift?

S: I mean, I’m Jewish. I’m fairly observant. I was at a Seder last night. When people say the pro-Palestinian movement is antisemitic, they’re lying. I’m just flat-out saying I think a lot of people, on some level, know that this isn’t about Jews. This isn’t about Judaism. It’s about the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in our people’s name. And if you support it, that is going to lead people to make a bunch of bad inferences about you, because you’re vocally supporting a genocide.

This weaponization is meant to shift focus away from Gaza, away from Palestine, the people who are being massacred, the people whose bodies they found in a mass grave at a hospital yesterday. The point is to distract from the fact that there is no moral case to defend what Israel was doing. So the only thing that Zionists have going for them is just smears, attacking the movement, tone-policing, demanding we take stances that they’re never asked to take. No one ever asks pro-Israel protestors, “Do you condemn the Israeli government,” because Israel is seen as a legitimate entity.

First of all, I want to clarify, this is about Palestine. I don’t want to get too far into talking about how the genocide, the Zionist backlash to the movement, affects me as a Jewish person, because I have a roof over my head. There’s not going to be a bomb dropping into my home.

The narrative that we’re really trying to put out is this, what we’re calling the Popular University for Gaza, and it’s an overarching campaign narrative over this. Basically, the idea is that everything that’s happening is laying bare the fact that universities do not care about their students, or their staff, or their faculty, who are the people who make the university a university, and not just an investment firm. They care about their investments and profit and their reputation and, essentially, managing social change.

Columbia University Press Blog (2/27/19)

So what we’re doing is, as students, making encampments, taking up space on their campuses. And a crucial part of these encampments is the programming in them. It’s drawing on the traditions of Freedom Schools in the ’60s and in the South, and also the Popular University for Palestine, which was a movement, I think it’s still ongoing, in Palestine, basically educators teaching for liberation, teaching about the history of Palestinian figures, about resistance, about colonialism.

But the idea is that students are inserting themselves, forcibly disrupting the university’s normal business; and threatening the university’s reputation is a big part of it, and just rejecting their legitimacy, establishing the Popular University for teaching, where scholarship is done for the benefit of the people, not for preserving hegemony.

With this whole thing, we’re trying to emphasize, basically, that our universities, they have built all these reputations and all these super great things about them, but they don’t care about the people in them. So we’re going to take the structures that make up them, which are the people within them, and essentially turn them toward liberation, and against imperialism, against the ruling class.

Reuters (4/29/24)

JJ: Well, thank you very much. I want to say it’s very refreshing, and refreshing is not enough. A lot of folks are drawing inspiration from hearing people say, “The New York Times is saying I’m antisemitic. Maybe I should shut up, you know? Media are saying I’m disruptive. Oh, maybe I should quiet down.” I don’t see any evidence of shutting up or quieting down, despite, really, the full narrative power, along with other kinds of power, being brought against protesters. It doesn’t seem to be shutting people up.

S: No, because that’s the thing, is students have had enough, students are perfectly willing now to risk suspension, risk expulsion, because they know that, essentially, the university’s prestige has been shattered. Even me, I’m currently in school, I’m a grad student. I’ve realized, so far I’ve been OK, but even if I did get expelled, or forced to drop out of my program, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what people in Palestine are going through. We are willing to sacrifice our futures in a system that increasingly doesn’t give us a future anyway. I think that’s another big part of it, is the feeling that, basically, even if you get a degree, you’re still going to be living precariously for a decade.

And another thing is, also, that today’s college seniors graduated from high school in the spring of 2020. They never really had a normal college experience. Their freshman year was online, so they never developed the bonds with that university, traditional attachment to the university. And also, the universities, the way they handled Covid generally has been terrible, and just seeing them completely disregard their students during the pandemic, I think, has really radicalized a lot of students. Basically, they’re willing to defy the institution.

This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine. It’s not about standing with Columbia students. They have repeatedly asked: Don’t center them; center Gaza. And, basically, we reject the university system as the arbiter of our futures, the arbiter of right and wrong. And we’re going to make our own learning spaces until they listen to us and stop investing our tuition dollars in genocide.

So yeah, free Palestine.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sam from Students for Justice in Palestine, NationalSJP.org. Thank you so much, Sam, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

S: Yeah, thanks for having me.

The post ‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’: CounterSpin interview with Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 26, 2024

WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again

The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.”

In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools.”

The piece was written by Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who regularly contributes longform features that platform anti-trans and anti–Critical Race Theory views through a palatable “hear me out” frame, while including little in the way of opposing arguments—or fact checks (FAIR.org, 5/11/23, 2/12/22, 8/2/21).

This profile of the Fontanillas—two former California teachers who left their jobs and moved to Florida in 2020, “disillusioned” by school shutdowns and colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows the Post once again depicting efforts to address racial and gender bias as a bigger problem than racial and gender bias themselves.

‘Direct from the classroom’

“The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits,” Natanson wrote:

But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools—and offer families an alternative.

The irony of the Fontanillas founding a far-right Christian school to fight “indoctrination” is lost on Natanson, as she, too, uncritically repeated these claims, as though the couple’s experience as teachers legitimized the far-right ideologies they peddle.

Natanson reported that Kali’s social media presence has attracted people to her school—despite her being “regularly suspended for ‘community violations.’” The article does not specify what those violations are, but on Instagram, Kali herself shared a screenshot of her account being flagged for disinformation, and another video talking about how a post she made about “newcomers” (i.e., migrants) received a “violation,” in calls to get her followers to follow her backup account.

The piece refers to her ideas—including referring to Black History Month as “Black idolatry month” and encouraging her followers to be doomsday preppers—as “out there.”

Kali is half Black and half white, and Joshua is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent—a fact that is mentioned alongside the couple’s gripes with the idea of slavery reparations and the concept that America is systemically racist.

Hate and conspiracy theories

The punchline here is that Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 4/5/24) ought to be able to call members of groups she dislikes “freaks.”

Kali brags that the more right-wing her ideas, the more families she attracts to her school. “But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from online observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview,” Natanson wrote.

The “hate” that these videos “inspire,” Natanson wrote, is from commenters who oppose Kali’s messages:

Online commenters regularly sling racial slurs and derogatory names: “slave sellout roach.” “dumb fukn bitch.” “wish dot com Candice Owen.” “Auntie Tomella.”

Never mind the hate and conspiracy theories Kali spews in her videos. A recent video on Kali’s Instagram begs followers to follow a backup account, because a video she made about migrants was taken down by Meta as a violation of community standards. She says she believes her account has been “shadowbanned”—or muted by the platform.

Even the posts that remain unflagged by Instagram are full of bigotry and disinformation, including a cartoon of carnival performers being let go from a sideshow because they’re “not freaks anymore,” a compilation video of trans women in women’s restrooms with text that reads “get these creeps out of our bathrooms,” and a photo of a trans flag that demands, “Defund the grooming cult.”

An ad Kali posted for an emergency medical kit claimed that the FDA had “lost its war” on Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that the right has latched onto as a panacea for Covid-19. In reality, the lawsuit the FDA settled with the drug company involved an acknowledgement that the drug has long been used to treat humans, not just livestock—but for parasites, not viruses (Newsweek, 3/22/24). The National Institutes of Health (12/20/23) report that double-blind testing reveals ivermectin is ineffective against Covid.

Evidence of ‘indoctrination’

For Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 1/9/24), the “facts” are transphobic, and “feelings” are to be disregarded—other people’s feelings, anyway.

Kali, who regularly mocks trans women and left-wing activists, apparently couldn’t take the heat. The backlash got so bad, Natanson writes, that

coupled with her chihuahua’s death and an injury that prevented her daily workouts, it proved too much for Kali. She went into a depressive spiral and had to take a break from social media. She barely managed to film her lessons.

In the Fontanillas’ lessons, the existence of white Quakers who fought against slavery is proof that racism is not institutionalized in the US. It’s also evidence of an “overemphasis” on reparations, even though, as Natanson mentioned toward the very end of the piece, many Quakers did take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later chose to pay reparations.

In addition to Covid shutdowns, other evidence of left-wing “indoctrination” offered by the Fontanillas included a quiz that asked students to recognize their privilege, the use of a Critical Race Theory framework in an ethnic studies class, announcements for gay/straight alliance club meetings (with no announcements made for Joshua’s chess club meetings), and the work of “too many” “left-leaning” authors—like Studs Terkel, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman—in the English curriculum.

Natanson includes a positive testimonial from a mother whose son Kali tutored before her political shift rightward, who remembers how “Kali let him run around the block whenever he got antsy,” and a screenshot of a review from a current student, who says they “love love LOVE” Kali’s teaching, because it exposes “the stupid things on the internet in a logical way.” Natanson also quotes an employee of the company that handles the logistics for Southlands Christian Schools, the entity from which the Fontanillas’ school gets its accreditation, who says, “Josh and Kali are good people, they have a good message, there is definitely a market for what they’re doing.”

The only opposition to the Fontanillas’ arguments in the nearly 3,000-word piece, beyond incoherent social media comments, come in the form of official statements and school board meeting soundbites.

Natanson includes a statement from the school district the Fontanillas formerly worked, saying that the ethnic studies class Kali resigned over was intended to get students to “analyze whether or not race may be viewed as a contributor to one’s experiences.” Another statement from the district denied Joshua’s claims that his school privileged certain clubs over others, and upheld that its English curriculum followed California standards.

The only direct quotes from students opposing the Fontanillas are two short comments from students at a school board meeting who said they enjoyed the ethnic studies class. It does not appear Natanson directly interviewed either student: One statement was taken directly from the school board meeting video, and the other from a local news article. The lack of any original, critical quotes in the piece raises the question: Did Natanson talk to anyone who disagreed with the Fontanillas during her reporting on the article?

Bigger threats than pronouns

The Washington Post profile presents the Fontanillas as pious and principled—leaving out any imagery of their hate-filled ideology.

The article included a dramatic vignette of the couple bowing their heads after seeing a public art exhibit with pieces depicting a book in chains and a student wearing earrings that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS”—”just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray,” Natanson wrote.

While thus passing along uncritically the Fontanillas’ take on what’s wrong with the world today, the article made no mention of more substantial threats bigotry poses to children and society at large.

LGBTQ youth experience bullying at significantly greater rates than their straight and cisgender peers (Reisner et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2021), and bullying is a strong risk factor for youth suicide (Koyanagi, et al., 2019). LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). However, bullying of LGBTQ youth occurs less often at LGBTQ-affirming schools (Trevor Project, 2021).

A recent study found that about 53% of Black students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 20% said they were exposed to racial trauma often or very often in their lives (Aakoma Project, 2022).

Individuals of Black and Hispanic heritage have a higher risk of Covid infection and hospitalization from than their white counterparts (NIH, 2023). Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker (4/24/23) found that during the pandemic, communities of color faced higher premature death rates.

The migrants at the US border that Kali demonizes in her videos are seeking asylum from gang violence, the targeting of women and girls, and oppressive regimes propped up by US policy. Undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as US citizens to be arrested for violent crimes (PNAS, 12/7/20). They are also being turned away at higher rates under Biden than they were under Trump (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

Not the censored worldview

Far from being suppressed, the “anti-woke” movement is very effective at suppressing ideas that it disagrees with (Pen America).

The idea that left-wing “propaganda” is “infiltrating” public schools is upside-down. If there’s a particular ideology that is being systematically censored in this country, to the point where it deserves special consideration by the Washington Post, it is not the Fontanillas’.

Since 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to ban Critical Race Theory in schools. Eighteen states have already imposed these bans or restrictions (Education Week, 3/20/24). The right is pushing for voucher schemes that transfer tax revenues from public to private schools, including to politicized projects like Exodus Institute (Progressive, 8/11/21; EPI, 4/20/23).

In the first half of this school year alone, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being banned. According to PEN America (4/16/24), people are using sexual obscenity laws to justify banning books that discuss sexual violence and LGBTQ (particularly trans) identities, disproportionately affecting the work of women and nonbinary writers. Bans are also targeted toward literature that focuses on race and racism, Critical Race Theory and “woke ideology.”

It is dangerous and backwards for the Washington Post to play along with this couples’ delusion that they are free speech martyrs—even as their “anti-woke” agenda is being signed into censorious law across the country.

The piece ended back in the virtual classroom with the Quakers, as Natanson takes on a tone of admiration. Kali poses the question to her students, “What does it mean to live out your values?”

“Kali smiled as she told her students to write down their answers,” Natanson narrated. “She knew her own.”

The post WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 26, 2024

News of Mass Graves Isn’t Much News to US Outlets

Reuters (4/23/24)

The bodies of over 300 people were discovered in a mass grave at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a Gaza city besieged by Israeli forces. The discovery of these Palestinian bodies, many of which were reportedly bound and stripped, is more evidence of “plausible” genocide committed by Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians have died thus far, with more than two-thirds of the casualties being women and children (Al Jazeera, 4/21/24).

Yet this discovery prompted few US news headlines, despite outlets like the Guardian (4/23/24), Haaretz (4/23/24) and Reuters (4/23/24) covering the story. Instead, headlines relating to Palestine have predominantly focused on protests happening at university campuses across the country—an important story, but not one that ought to drown out coverage of the atrocities students are protesting against.

Israel’s Haaretz noted that

emergency workers in white hazmat suits had been seen digging near the ruins of Nasser Hospital. They reportedly dug corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. The emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the number found over the week to 283.

The bodies included people killed during the Israeli siege of Khan Yunis, as well as people killed after Israel occupied the medical complex in February (Guardian, 4/22/24). They were found under piles of waste, with several bodies having their hands tied and clothes stripped off (UN, 4/23/24; Democracy Now!, 4/25/24). Similar mass graves, containing at least 381 bodies, were found at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital after Israel withdrew from occupying that complex on April 1 (CNN, 4/9/24).

The discovery of these mass graves “horrified” UN rights chief Volker Turk (Reuters, 4/23/24). But it has yet to prompt so strong a reaction from several major US news outlets.

Limited response

PBS NewsHour (4/22/24)

In comparison to the widespread coverage from international outlets, the US response has been limited at best. Newsweek (4/23/24) published an article that included claims from the IDF that the deaths were a result of a “precise” operation against Hamas near Nasser Hospital:

About 200 terrorists who were in the hospital were apprehended, medicines intended for Israeli hostages were found undelivered and unused, and a great deal of ammunition was confiscated.

The article centered on the US response to the reports of mass graves. Along with CNN (4/23/24), Newsweek included quotes from the IDF that called reports of mass burials of Palestinians by the Israeli army “baseless and unfounded.” Rather, the IDF said, they were merely exhuming the bodies to verify whether or not they were Israeli hostages.

The Washington Post (4/23/24) relegated the news to a small section of their live updates feed: “UN Calls for Investigation of Gaza Mass Grave; IDF Says It Excavated Bodies.”

CNN and PBS (4/22/24) both published relatively well-rounded reports of the discovery, noting reports of 400 missing people and allegations of IDF soldiers performing DNA tests on the bodies, along with accounts of people still searching for their loved ones amidst the rubble. CNN released an update April 24:

At least 381 bodies were recovered from the vicinity of the complex since Israeli forces withdrew on April 1, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, adding that the total figure did not include people buried within the grounds of the hospital.

The update was also released to CNN‘s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter.

As FAIR (11/17/23, 2/1/24, 4/17/24) has repeatedly noted, coverage of the war has widely been from an Israel-centered perspective. The CNN and PBS articles, however, along with an NBC video, prominently included quotes from Palestinians searching for family members.

New York Times (4/23/24)

The same cannot be said for outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, who cited sources from the UN and the Palestinian Civil Defense—a governmental organization that operates under the Palestinian Security Services—but didn’t include additional first-hand accounts from Palestinian civilians.

The Times said that “it was not clear where the people discovered in the mass grave were originally buried.” It didn’t mention that several family members of the deceased remembered where they buried them, but were no longer able to find them, they said, due to IDF interference (CNN, 4/23/24):

Another man, who said his brother Alaa was also killed in January, said: “I am here today looking for him. I have been coming here to the hospital for the last two weeks and trying to find him. Hopefully, I will be able to find him.”

Pointing to a fallen palm tree, the man said his brother had been temporarily buried in that spot.

“I had buried him there on the side, but I can’t find him. The Israelis have dug up the dead bodies, and switched them. They took DNA tests and misplaced all the dead bodies.”

Playing catch-up

Democracy Now! (4/25/24)

As mentioned above, US news outlets have had considerable coverage of pro-Palestine university protests, particularly since April 18, when more than 100 demonstrators were arrested at New York’s Columbia University (FAIR.org, 4/19/24). News of these protests have dominated US headlines since (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 4/25/24; AP, 4/25/24; The Hill, 4/24/24); while the discovery of mass graves just a few days later has received next to no coverage in comparison. In the case of the New York Times, for instance, they published just two stories (4/23/24, 4/25/24) about the mass graves since the news broke on April 21, while publishing seven stories about the campus protests in the span of two days.

The New York Times has been telling writers not to use words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the violence in Gaza, a leaked internal memo revealed (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24). Accordingly, the Times used the phrase “wartime chaos” to explain the mass graves, as if they were merely a side effect of war, not the result of intentional bombing campaigns.

While some prominent US media outlets are beginning to report on this discovery (ABC, 4/25/24; AP, 4/23/24; HuffPost, 4/24/24), they are playing catch-up with their international counterparts, whose reporting makes up a majority of search results on Google. Even articles that do appear on the first page rely heavily on reports from official spokespeople (e.g., Spectrum News, 4/23/24; The Hill, 4/23/24).

The UN’s Turk (4/23/24) has called for an independent investigation into the mass graves, saying “the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.” Corporate news outlets have been quick to note that the claims of bodies being found with their hands tied “cannot be substantiated,” despite consistent reports from both Palestinian officials and the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights about the condition of the bodies.

The post News of Mass Graves Isn’t Much News to US Outlets appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 26, 2024

Acknowledging the Horrors of Gaza—Without Wanting to End Them

The International Court of Justice in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The next month, in a lawsuit aimed at ending US military support for Israel, a federal court in California ruled that Israel’s actions in the Strip “plausibly” amount to genocide (Guardian, 2/1/24). Shortly thereafter, Michael Fakhri (Guardian, 2/27/24), the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said of Israeli actions:

There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza—other than to deny people access to food….

Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide. This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable—not just individuals or this government or that person.

In March, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese released a report concluding “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” During its campaign in Gaza, Israel’s “military has been heavily reliant on imported aircraft, guided bombs and missiles,” and 69% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023 have come from the US (BBC, 4/5/24).

The Washington Post (3/30/24) hopes the US can get back on the same page with “mainstream Israelis” who are “willing to see the war through to finish off Hamas.”

In this context, corporate media, which have long been strong supporters of both the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the US imperial violence undergirding it, face a dilemma. At this stage, corporate media cannot simply conceal the daily horrors that are unfolding, particularly as much of their audience is exposed to it whenever they open a social media app. So media’s challenge is to frame the “plausible” genocide in a way that will not undermine long-term US/Israeli domination of Palestine. In this context, many corporate media analysts acknowledge the grave harm done to the Palestinians in Gaza—without also saying that it must end.

A Washington Post editorial (3/30/24), for example, lamented how “hunger threatens Gaza’s civilians, who, through displacement, disease and death, have already paid a horrible price.” (“Israel is forcing hunger on Gaza with US support” would be better, but I digress.) Subsequently, the paper noted that “objective conditions for the 2 million or so people in Gaza, most displaced from ruined homes, are horrendous.”

The editors’ prescription in “the short run” was “a six-week truce with Hamas, during which the militants would release at least some of their hostages and relief supplies could flow into Gaza more safely.” At that point, Palestinians can resume paying that “horrible price” in “horrendous” conditions, such as having “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).

‘The weapons it needs’

David French (New York Times, 4/7/24) thinks the question of “whether Israel’s behavior as it battles Hamas complies with the laws of war” is “worth answering in full when the fog of war clears.”

Columnist David French likewise wrote in the New York Times (4/7/24) that “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza are a human tragedy that should grieve us all,” but endorsed “giving Israel the weapons it needs to prevail against Hamas.” He favorably compared the Biden’s administration’s lavishing Israel with weapons to Donald’s Trump’s remark that Israel has “got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.” French said:

Though I have some qualms with the details of the Biden administration’s approach, its directional thrust—providing military aid while exerting relentless pressure for increased humanitarian efforts—is superior. It’s much closer to matching the military, legal and moral needs of the moment.

“Israel,” French asserted, “possesses both the legal right and moral obligation to its people to end Hamas’s rule and destroy its effectiveness as a fighting force.” French’s argument was that the US should keep arming Israel, but ensure that more aid reaches Palestinians in Gaza. The absurdity of this position is that Israel’s use of that “military aid” is what causes “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza.”

At the time French was writing, at least 27 Palestinians in Gaza had already starved to death, 23 of them children (Al Jazeera, 3/27/24). As the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System, a hunger-monitoring coalition of multinational and nongovernmental organizations, noted in December:

The cessation of hostilities and the restoration of humanitarian space to deliver…multi-sectoral assistance and restore services are essential first steps in eliminating any risk of famine.

Commenting on the report, famine expert Alex de Waal (Guardian, 3/21/24) said that

Israel has had ample warning of what will happen if it continues its campaign of destroying everything necessary to sustain life. The IPC’s Famine Review Committee report on 21 December authoritatively warned of starvation if Israel did not cease destruction and failed to allow humanitarian aid at scale.

In short, the large-scale famine about which French professed concern can only be averted by ending the Israeli onslaught that he supports. (At least French has “qualms” about that, though.)

Reversing reality

The LA Times (4/9/24) insists “it is Hamas that keeps the war going,” even as it blames “Israel‘s retaliatory actions” for “leading the US to reassess the two nations’ relationship.”

A Los Angeles Times editorial (4/9/24) expressed concern for “the level of death and destruction in Gaza” and wrote that, in a February news conference, “Biden was particularly critical—appropriately so—of the inability of humanitarian relief workers to get food and water to Gaza’s 2.3 million people, many of whom face famine.” The piece went on to call for “hostage releases and a lasting ceasefire.”

Yet the article’s penultimate paragraph read: “It is Hamas that keeps the war going by continuing to hold the hostages it brutally kidnapped in its October attack.”

That’s not accurate. Days earlier (Times of Israel, 4/6/24), the group reaffirmed its position in the “hostage negotiations,” demanding a

complete ceasefire, withdrawal of the occupation forces from Gaza, the return of the displaced to their residential areas, freedom of movement of the people, offering them aid and shelter, and a serious hostage exchange deal.

In contrast, the White House advocated a “pause in fighting” and “temporary ceasefire.” Washington’s Israeli client likewise sought a short-term break in the fighting, saying “that, after any truce, it would topple Hamas” (Reuters, 4/7/24).

Thus, the reality was exactly the opposite of what the LA Times said: The Israeli/US side wanted to take a short break from slaughtering Palestinians, whereas the Palestinian side was insisting on the “lasting ceasefire” that the paper claimed to favor. Whatever the editors purport to want, regurgitating anti-Palestinian propaganda that essentially blames Palestinians for their own genocide, rather than the US/Israeli perpetrators, is hardly an effective way to contribute to ending the killing.

I’ve cited four authoritative sources either saying that Israel is committing genocide, or that there are reasonable grounds for interpreting the evidence that way. Yet none of the opinion articles I’ve analyzed here contained the word “genocide,” even as each one suggested that it was worried about the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza. If corporate media were serious about that, they would accurately name what the US and Israel are doing. Instead, US media outlets are pretending that a genocide isn’t happening and, when the war on Gaza eventually ends, this approach will make it easier to act as if one hadn’t taken place, and as if the US and Israel have a right to rule Palestine.

The post Acknowledging the Horrors of Gaza—Without Wanting to End Them appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 26, 2024

Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine, Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers

Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew)

This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of professed concerns for “safety.” A Vanderbilt student is on TikTok noting that their chancellor has run away from offers to engage them, despite his claim to the New York Times that it’s protestors who are “not interested in dialogue”—and Columbia University students have set up an encampment seen around the world, holding steady as we record April 25, despite the college siccing the NYPD on them.

Campuses across the country—Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on—are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians, and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We’ll hear from Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

(CC photo: Edenpictures)

Also on the show: App-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees, and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media, happy to typey-type about the worry of more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy…bicycle deliverers. We asked Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine, Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 24, 2024

Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions

Uri Berliner (Free Press, 4/9/24) blamed what he saw as NPR‘s problems on the way that “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” reads the headline of a recent essay in the Free Press (4/9/24), a Substack-hosted outlet published by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. The author, senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner, argued that the broadcaster’s “progressive worldview” was compromising its journalism and alienating conservatives, including Berliner himself—who subsequently resigned.

Berliner’s screed was the latest instance of a trend in which legacy-media staffers publicly grouse that their workplaces are overrun by left-wing firebrands. Former New York Times assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein recently did so in the Atlantic (2/26/24). Two months before that, James Bennet, previously the editorial page editor at the Times, spent 16,000 words lamenting that the Times had “lost its way” in the Economist’s 1843 supplement (12/24/23).

Readers were invited to view these critics as brave iconoclasts at odds with the radical doctrines of their former employers. But the records of NPR and the New York Times show just how misleading this characterization is.

Right-wing embrace

The tirades shared several themes, including resentment of the 2020 protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd. Rather than letting “evidence lead the way,” Berliner complained that NPR management “declared loud and clear” that “America’s infestation with systemic racism…was a given.” He rebuked NPR for supposedly “justifying looting” in relation to the demonstrations, citing an interview (8/27/20) with In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil. Conveniently, Berliner didn’t note NPR’s repeated scolding of looters (6/2/20, 8/11/20, 10/28/20) before and after that interview.

Adam Rubenstein (Atlantic, 2/26/24) presents his career at the New York Times—where he was hired to seek out “expressly conservative views” because he had “contacts on the political right”—as evidence of the paper’s left-wing bias.

Both Rubenstein and Bennet condemned the Times’ handling of an op-ed (6/3/20) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that they took part in publishing. Appearing during the uprisings, the op-ed called for the deployment of the military to suppress protests. (In Bennet’s view, Cotton wanted to “protect lives and businesses from rioters.”) After much reader—and staffer—outrage at the bald incitement of racist violence, the Times appended a note stating regret over the piece, and both editors left the newspaper.

Embittered by the Times’ response, neither Rubenstein nor Bennet paused to consider that a paper that had not only commissioned a fascistic op-ed by a neocon senator, but had published that same senator multiple times before—in one case, to celebrate the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani (1/10/20)—might not be beholden to the left.

Bennet also complained that the Times was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab”—which is true; the Times‘ coverage of the lab leak theory in 2020 was decidedly (and appropriately) skeptical (2/17/20, 4/30/20, 5/3/20; see FAIR.org, 10/6/20). The paper did eventually jump on the bandwagon of the evidence-free conspiracy theory, with David Leonhardt promoting it in his popular Morning newsletter (5/27/21).

James Bennet (1843, 12/24/23) blames the rise of Trump on journalists’ forfeiting “their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas”—which is odd, because his argument is that journalists shouldn’t arbitrate truth or broker ideas.

Berliner, too, took umbrage at his employer’s treatment of the lab theory:

We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

But NPR did budge. An episode of Morning Edition (2/27/23) featuring Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon promoted the Energy Department’s admittedly shaky assertion, lending credence to a hypothesis informed far more by anti-China demagoguery than by scientific evidence (FAIR.org, 6/28/21, 4/7/23). This wasn’t the first time NPR had advanced the theory: In a 2021 segment of Morning Edition (6/3/21), media correspondent David Folkenflik suggested that news organizations publicizing the lab-leak claim were “listen[ing] closely.”

‘Good terms with people in power’

Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) diagnosed NPR‘s actual problem: “NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.”

The perceived lack of lab-leak coverage was one of many examples Berliner cited to make the case that NPR sought to “damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Yet, as NPR alum Alicia Montgomery wrote for Slate (4/16/24):

I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.

Contrary to Berliner’s allegations, Montgomery noted that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” When a colleague “asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,” they were met with silence.

On the subject of Israel and Palestine, Berliner condemned what he perceived as NPR’s “oppressor versus oppressed” framing. Rubenstein, meanwhile, remarked that a colleague once told him, “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable.” It’s possible that a New York Times journalist said this, even if Rubenstein’s anecdotes elicited skepticism. But the coverage of the Times, and of NPR, contradict this sentiment.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that media platforms resemble, in Rubenstein’s words, “young progressives on college campuses,” when they soften Israeli militarism through human-interest stories (NPR, 12/27/23; FAIR.org, 1/25/24), deem Israeli sources more worthy than Palestinian ones (FAIR.org, 11/3/23) and discourage the use of words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Israel’s Gaza assault (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24).

Warmly welcomed rebukes

Politico (12/14/23) accepted Bennet’s depiction of a struggle at the Times between “traditional journalistic values like fairness, pluralism and political independence,” and “the ideological whims of the paper’s younger, left-leaning staffers.”

Undermining the self-assigned pariah status of Berliner, Rubenstein and Bennet, corporate media have normalized, even endorsed, the authors’ polemics.

The New York Times (4/11/24) reported that NPR had been “accused of liberal bias”—the word “accused” implying that insufficient appeal to the far right was a misdeed. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board (4/14/24) called Berliner’s essay “nuanced and thoughtful,” and commended his “courage” in adopting what the Tribune considered a dissident stance among news organizations. Berliner offered “good lessons for all news organizations,” the paper concluded.

A month prior, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait (3/1/24) defended Rubenstein’s rant, breezing past its disdain for racial justice activists to insist on the veracity of a detail about a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Chait wrapped the piece with a grumble about the “left-wing media criticism” that dared to doubt Rubenstein; right-wing media criticism, of course, was safely in Chait’s good graces.

The day 1843 published Bennet’s harangue, Politico (12/14/23) ran a splashy profile portraying Bennet as the victim of left-wing tyranny. The publication described Bennet as “armed” with damning email correspondence and verbatim quotations from the end of his tenure at the Times, depicting him as a lone soldier battling those who “pushed the paper to elevate liberal viewpoints and shun conservative perspectives.”

The real heretics

Criticism from the left is something the New York Times won’t tolerate (New York Post, 2/16/23).

NPR and the Times themselves, while articulating some disagreement with their critics, largely accepted those critics’ premises. In an internal email, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin indulged Berliner’s demands to appeal to the right, stressing the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos.” (NPR staffers have since written an internal letter urging a more forceful defense of the outlet.) Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s response to Bennet sympathized further, presenting a rightward shift as a point of pride: “Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.”

The New York Times’ message stands in stark contrast to one it sent not long before. In February 2023, over 1,200 Times contributors signed an open letter expressing alarm about the paper’s demeaning coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people, noting that three Times articles had been referenced as justification in anti-trans legislation. Rather than taking these concerns into consideration, or even recognizing their legitimacy, the paper declared it was “proud of its coverage.” Sulzberger went on to exalt said reportage as “true” and “important” (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).

In this media milieu—in which it’s more acceptable to support reactionaries in power than the people whose lives they attempt to destroy—the real “heretics” prove not to be those issuing critiques from the right, but from the left.

The post Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 22, 2024

‘A Monopoly on the Bomb Would Be a Catastrophe for the World’: CounterSpin interview with Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country

Janine Jackson interviewed author Dave Lindorff about his book Spy for No Country for the April 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The success of the movie Oppenheimer showed that there is interest in the human beings involved in the Manhattan Project: the choices, beliefs, situational ethics, if you will, of those involved in the World War II program to develop the atomic bomb.

Another key figure, likewise reflective of the human complexities involved in creating and deploying this devastating technology, has remained relatively unknown, until now. Ted Hall was just 18 years old when he was recruited to Los Alamos, where he became a key scientist behind the bombs known as Little Boy and Fat Man, and eventually a spy, delivering nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. His story was the subject of the 2022 documentary A Compassionate Spy, by acclaimed Hoop Dreams director Steve James.

Prometheus Books (2024)

Our guest was a co-producer of that film, and is author of a new book, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, from Prometheus Books. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets, and is author of Marketplace Medicine, and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Lindorff.

Dave Lindorff: Thanks for having me on.

JJ: Well, we can’t presume listeners who knew who Robert Oppenheimer was even before the movie have even heard the name Ted Hall before. So in bold strokes, what did he do, and when or in what context?

DL: Ted Hall is really fascinating; because he was so young, he’s been overlooked, I think, by historians, even of that era of the development of atomic energy. And part of the reason, too, is that he was never prosecuted, even though, in 1950, he was one of the first people identified as an atomic spy at Los Alamos, with the final decryption starting to happen of the Soviet spy cables that the precursor to the NSA had been collecting from Soviet consulates.

Yet, despite Hoover getting that information in 1950, and interrogating him, and his Harvard roommate courier, for three hours, the case went nowhere. And the book explains why.

JJ: Folks may not remember, or it might be a little confuddled: The Soviet Union was an ally during World War II.

DL: That’s a very important point to make, that people have to realize as they learn about this guy.

JJ: Yeah. So as much as we might want to ascribe motivation, especially after the fact, we can never see inside another person’s head. But what is the sense of what Hall thought he was doing? He wasn’t, for instance, a Communist himself.

DL: No, he was not a Communist when he was a spy. He did briefly join the party, he and his wife that he married after the war; they both became party members for a few months because, as they said, it was the only organization they felt was combating the segregation in the US, and that was defending workers’ right to organize.

JJ: When we say: “what did Ted Hall do?” What did he do, and why do we think he did it?

DL: Well, he was so smart, incredibly brilliant, and it was recognized when he got there. He was assigned to be working on the development of the implosion system for the plutonium bomb, which was a very complicated bomb. The uranium bomb was very simple, you just had to refine enough U-235, which is a minute portion of uranium ore, in order for it to work. But with plutonium, it was so unstable that it was very hard to work with in large quantities.

So he was working on that project. He understood the entire details of the plutonium bomb, and he realized that Germany was not going to get the bomb—it was being bombed to smithereens in 1944, when he was hired—and that the US was going to come out of the war with a monopoly on the bomb, which he thought would be a catastrophe for the world, I think, correctly.

So he decided the only thing to do was to give Soviets the bomb, so that there would be two countries with the bomb, that would prevent each of them from using it.

JJ: I’ve heard it said that, put simply, Oppenheimer thought he could somehow get nuclear weaponry eliminated, or under international control, but, as you say, Hall thought that mutually assured destruction would keep this technology from being used. Is that it?

DL: Yeah.

Decider (11/30/23)

JJ: I appreciated a review of the film A Compassionate Spy in Decider that said: “Is Ted Hall a hero or a traitor? Note to everyone everywhere: You don’t need to answer that question.” In other words, agreeing with him and his actions isn’t necessary. It’s really more about the complexity of truth, that questions exist for which there are no satisfying answers. But I think it’s difficult for folks to put themselves back in the head of a person making that choice at that time.

DL: Well, you have to know what people were thinking at that time. At that time, for example, there was a dinner hosted by the British scientists who’d been brought over at a late period; I guess they came in early 1944 from England to help speed up the development of the bomb. And there was a dinner that they hosted, and they had invited Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the whole Manhattan Project. And over dessert, people were starting to say—this happened in the spring of 1944—that they shouldn’t really build the bomb, because the Germans weren’t going to get the bomb. And why were they developing it? And Grove said, well, as you know, the bomb was not really to target Germany; it was to help control the Soviet Union.

And that went around the camp. Because Los Alamos had these rules, that Oppenheimer insisted on, that there was absolute openness within the heavily guarded walls of the camp. But outside, there was no discussion about what they were doing. It was all top secret, and nobody knew what was happening inside that fence.

What they didn’t know was that there were spies within it, and one of them was Ted Hall. He certainly heard the scuttlebutt that the Russians were the real target, and that was very disturbing to him, and to many of the scientists, who felt that the Soviets were doing most of the dying and most of the fighting against the Germans at that time, and that they were our ally.

JJ: You touched on it, but let me just ask you directly: Why wasn’t Ted Hall prosecuted? Why wasn’t he treated the way that Oppenheimer was?

Edward N. Hall (Wikipedia)

DL: It’s an amazing story. It turns out that Ted’s older brother, 11 years older than him, had taken charge of his early education and encouraged him to go to Harvard when he was 18. And this brother, Ed Hall, actually became the top rocket scientist for the Air Force, and he developed the engine for the Atlas, the engine for the Titan, the engine for the Thor missile. And he invented the whole concept of ICBM with solid fuel, the Minuteman; that was his creation, and his idea of having hundreds of them in silos as a prevention of nuclear attack on the US was sold by him to the Defense secretary at the time, in the ’50s, and then to Eisenhower.

So he was so important to the Air Force—I got his FBI file, after they first told me there wasn’t one; I got over a hundred pages—that Hoover was hoping that he was going to catch him as a spy, Ed Hall, as a spy, as well as Ted Hall. And the Air Force shut him down. They basically refused to let him question Ed about his own history, just whether he knew anything about his brother, and he denied it. And then, by late 1951, Ted was taken off of the security index, and they stopped monitoring his mail and his funds.

Nobody ever knew that, why he didn’t get investigated. And it’s just astonishing, because, Janine, the most important thing about this story, and it’s another thing that Americans don’t know: As soon as the war ended, the US started, in the Manhattan Project and then later the Atomic Energy Commission, working feverishly to figure out a way to mass produce atomic bombs. And by ’48, they were producing them at a hundred a month. And why were they doing that, when they thought that there’d been no spies in the project, and that the Soviet Union would not get an atomic bomb for at least eight or ten years after this one—you know, the two bombs invented by the US, and tested on the Japanese?

So the reason was, they were preparing to attack the Soviet Union. There was even a day, they estimated in 1954, that they were calling “A-Day,” when it would be impossible to attack the Soviet Union preemptively, because they’d have the bomb by then and be able to slip one into a harbor in the US as retaliation. And that all fell apart when the Soviets detonated a carbon copy of the bomb that Ted was working on, in 1949.

JJ: In media, Dave, we know that US/Russia relations are super simplistically presented. It’s like Rock’em Sock’em Robots, you know, or King Kong vs. Godzilla. And the fact that there are human beings making choices, with the information that they have at the time and their thoughts about how what they’re doing might be used, it’s both difficult to think about and it’s easy to obscure. And so some folks now are rattling the nuclear saber, if only rhetorically, again. What do you think is the value of lifting up Ted Hall’s story right now?

Dave Lindorff: “He did what Oppenheimer wouldn’t do…. And the result was that we have not seen an atomic bomb used since Nagasaki.”

DL: First of all, he proved to be right. He did what Oppenheimer wouldn’t do, by actually sharing the secrets, and making it possible for there to be two countries with the bomb. And the result was that we have not seen an atomic bomb used since Nagasaki. We’re on 79 years and counting since those two bombs were dropped, and none has been used, because of multiple nations having the bomb. You just can’t do it.

Now, whether that’ll hold, it’s always been pretty precarious, but it’s the best that they’ve come up with, is just having mutual assured destruction. It’s not a good system, but it’s here.

I personally think that it’s bluster still, because all the game-planning, when they look at what happens if we use an atomic bomb, or we reply with an atomic bomb when one is used, it always escalates within hours or days into a full-scale global strategic nuclear bombing and destruction of the Earth.

JJ: Right. Well, let me ask you, finally, from a journalism or media perspective: some reviewers, of the film in particular, have said, essentially, humanizing Ted Hall at all— and the film talks a lot with his wife, Joan—humanizing him is bias, because he was a traitor, the end.

And then other people say, well, we don’t really need Wikipedia-style history. We don’t need news from nowhere, that it’s a disservice to just present sort of Big Good vs. Big Evil, and that starting from a human perspective helps us locate ourselves within this broad sweep of events that, once they’re done, can seem inevitable. And I don’t imagine that you would’ve been attracted to a story that was kind of cut, paste, print. The complexity, was that part of the draw for you?

DL: Yes, absolutely. I mean, think about what he did. At the one hand, he thought that the bomb was a horrible, horrible thing. At the other, he was working feverishly trying to help them get it, because when he was hired, he thought it was important to get it before the Germans did. And then when he found that wasn’t the case, he was still working on it, because he knew that it was going to be built, with him or without him. And yet, that meant he was contributing to when it was finally used, because he wanted to be able to give all the information to the Russians. He knew that there were going to be bombs used if that didn’t happen.

And I think that’s correct, that it must have been torture for him to know that he had helped create what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he felt it was the right thing that he had done. So it was very complicated.

JJ: All right, then, well, we’ll leave it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Dave Lindorff. The new book, Spy for No Country, is out from Prometheus Books. Thank you so much, Dave Lindorff, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DL: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

The post ‘A Monopoly on the Bomb Would Be a Catastrophe for the World’: CounterSpin interview with Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country appeared first on FAIR.

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April 19, 2024

The McCarthyist Attack on Gaza Protests Threatens Free Thought for All

With the encouragement of the state, universities from coast to coast are taking draconian steps to silence debate about US-backed violence in the Middle East.

The Columbia University community looked on in shock as cops in riot gear arrested at least 100 pro-Palestine protesters who had set up an encampment in the center of campus (New York Post, 4/18/24). The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, had just the day before testified before a Republican-dominated congressional committee ostensibly concerned with campus “antisemitism”—a label that has come to be misapplied to any criticism of Israel, though the critics so smeared are often themselves Jewish.

The New York Post (4/18/24) was also pleased that Google had fired 28 employees for protesting genocide.

A sense of delight has filled the city’s opinion pages. The New York Post editorial board (4/18/24) hailed both the clampdown on protests and Congress’s push to ensure that such drastic action against free speech was taken: “We’re glad to see Shafik stand up…. Congress deserves some credit for putting educrats’ feet to the fire on this issue.” The paper added, “Academia has been handling anti-Israel demonstrations with kid gloves.” In other words, universities have been allowing too many people to think and speak critically about an important issue of the day.

In “At Columbia, the Grown-Ups in the Room Take a Stand,” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (4/18/24) hailed the eviction, saying of the encampment that for the “passer-by, the fury and self-righteous sentiment on display was chilling,” and that for supporters of Israel, “it must be unimaginably painful.” In other words, conservative pundits have decided that campus safe spaces where speech is banned to protect the feelings of listeners are good, depending on the issue. Would Paul (no relation!) favor bans on pro-Taiwan or pro-Armenia demonstrations because they could offend Chinese and Turkish students?

And for Michael Oren, a prominent Israeli politico, Columbia students hadn’t suffered enough. He said of Columbia in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/19/24):

Missing was an admission of the university’s failure to enforce the measures it had enacted to protect its Jewish community. [Shafik] didn’t address how, under the banner of free speech, Columbia became inhospitable to Jews. She didn’t acknowledge how incendiary demonstrations such as the encampment were the product of the university’s inaction.

Shafik had assured her congressional interrogators that Columbia had already suspended 15 students for speaking out for Palestinian human rights, suspended two student groups—Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/10/23)—and had even terminated an instructor (New York Times, 4/17/24).

The hearing was bizarre, to say the least; a Georgia Republican asked the president if she wanted her campus to be “cursed by God” (New York Times, 4/18/24). (“Definitely not,” was her response.)

The former World Bank economist had clearly been shaken after seeing how congressional McCarthyism ousted two other female Ivy League presidents (FAIR.org, 12/12/23; Al Jazeera, 1/2/24).

‘Protected from having to hear’

Twenty-three Jewish faculty members at Columbia published a joint op-ed (Columbia Spectator, 4/10/24) reminding President Shafik that “labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity.”

“What happened at those hearings yesterday should be of grave concern to everybody, regardless of their feelings on Palestine, regardless of their politics,” Barnard College women’s studies professor Rebecca Jordan-Young told Democracy Now! (4/18/24). “What happened yesterday was a demonstration of the growing and intensifying attack on liberal education writ large.”

Her colleague, historian Nara Milanich, said in the same interview:

This is not about antisemitism so much as attacking areas of inquiry and teaching, whether it’s about voting rights or vaccine safety or climate change — right?—arenas of inquiry that are uncomfortable or inconvenient or controversial for certain groups. And so, this is essentially what we’re seeing, antisemitism being weaponized in a broad attack on the university.

Jewish faculty at Columbia spoke out against the callous misuse of antisemitism to silence students, but those in power aren’t listening (Columbia Spectator, 4/10/24).

Shafik justified authorizing the mass arrests, which many said hadn’t been seen on campus since the anti-Vietnam War protests of 1968. “The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies,” she said (BBC, 4/18/24). “Through direct conversations and in writing, the university provided multiple notices of these violations.”

One policy suggested by the university’s “antisemitism task force,” according to a university trustee who also testified (New York Times, 4/18/24): “If you are going to chant, it should only be in a certain place, so that people who don’t want to hear it are protected from having to hear it.”

Cross-country rollback

USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum says the school did not tell her what the security threats were, but said that the precautions that would be necessary to allow her to speak were “not what the university wants to ‘present as an image’” (Reuters, 4/18/24).

Meanwhile, the University of Southern California canceled the planned graduation speech by valedictorian Asna Tabassum—a Muslim woman who had spoken out for Palestine (Reuters, 4/18/24). The university cited unnamed “security risks”; The Hill (4/16/24) noted that “she had links to pro-Palestinian sites on her social media.” Andrew T. Guzman, the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in a statement that cancelation was “consistent with the fundamental legal obligation—including the expectations of federal regulators—that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe” (USC Annenberg Media, 4/15/24).

This is happening as academic freedom is being rolled back across the country. Republicans in Indiana recently passed a law to allow a politically appointed board to deny or even revoke university professors’ tenure if the board feels their classes lack “intellectual diversity”—at the same time that it threatens them if they seem “likely” to “subject students to political or ideological views and opinions” deemed unrelated to their courses (Inside Higher Ed, 2/21/24).

Benjamin Balthaser, associate professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, told FAIR in regard to the congressional hearing:

There is no other definition of bigotry or racism that equates criticism of a state, even withering, hostile criticism, with an entire ethnic or religious group, especially a state engaging in ongoing, documented war crimes and crimes against humanity. Added to this absurdity is the fact that many of the accused are not only Jewish, but have strong ties to their Jewish communities. To make such an equation assumes a collective or group homogeneity which is itself a form of essentialism, even racism itself: People are not reducible to the crimes of their state, let alone a state thousands of miles away to which most Jews are not citizens.

Of course, witch hunts against leftists in US society are often motivated by antisemitism. Balthaser again:

The far right has long deployed antisemitism as a weapon of censorship and repression, associating Jewishness with Communism and subversion during the First and Second Red Scares. Not only did earlier forms of McCarthyism overwhelmingly target Jews (Jews were two-thirds of the “defendants” called before HUAC in 1952, despite being less than 2% of the US population), it did so while cynically pretending to protect Jews from Communism. Something very similar is occurring now: Mobilizing a racist trope of Jewish adherence to Israel, far-right politicians are using accusations of antisemitism to both silence criticism of Israel and, in doing so, promote their antisemitic ideas of Jewishness in the world.

Silencing for ‘free speech’

The darker blue states have passed restrictions aimed at Critical Race Theory; in the lighter blue states, proposed restrictions have not been adopted (CRT Forward).

These universities are not simply clamping down on free speech because the administrators dislike this particular speech, or out of fear that pro-Palestine demonstrations or vocal faculty members could scare donors from writing big checks. This is a result of state actors—congressional Republicans, in particular—who are using their committee power and sycophants in the media to demand more firings, more suspensions, more censorship.

I have written for years (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 11/17/21, 3/25/22), as have many others, that Republican complaints about “cancel culture” on campus suppressing free speech are exaggerated. One of the biggest hypocrisies is that so-called free-speech conservatives claim that campus activists are silencing conservatives, but have little to say about blatant censorship and political firings when it comes to Palestine.

This isn’t a mere moral inconsistency. This is the anti-woke agenda at work: When criticism of the right is deemed to be the major threat to free speech, it’s a short step to enlisting the state to “protect” free speech by silencing the critics—in this case, dissenters against US support for Israeli militarism.

But this isn’t just about Palestine; crackdowns against pro-Palestine protests are part of a broader war against discourse and thought. The right has already paved the way for assaults on educational freedom with bans aimed at Critical Race Theory adopted in 29 states.

If the state can now stifle and punish speech against the murder of civilians in Gaza, what’s next? With another congressional committee investigating so-called infiltration by China’s Communist Party, will Chinese political scholars be targeted next (Reuters, 2/28/24)? With state laws against environmental protests proliferating (Sierra, 9/17/23), will there be a new McCarthyism against climate scientists? (Author Will Potter raised the alarm about a “green scare” more than a decade ago—People’s World, 9/26/11; CounterSpin, 2/1/13.)

Universities and the press are supposed to be places where we can freely discuss the issues of the day, even if that means having to hear opinions that might be hard for some to digest. Without those arenas for free thought, our First Amendment rights mean very little. If anyone who claims to be a free speech absolutist isn’t citing a government-led war against free speech and assembly on campuses as their No. 1 concern in the United States right now, they’re a fraud.

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April 19, 2024

Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country

Time (4/14/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed.

Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged.

But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful.

We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’

Prometheus Books (2024)

Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books.

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April 18, 2024

‘I Knew They Had Fabricated a False Narrative’: Interview with Estela Aranha on ‘Twitter Files Brazil’

UOL (4/11/24)

Libertarian pundit Michael Shellenberger on April 3 tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil‘s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.

A week later, Estela Aranha, former secretary of digital rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo district attorney’s office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues.

Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote: “I regret my my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter‘s Brazilian lawyer.”

The following interview with Estela Aranha was conducted on April 13, 2024.

Brian Mier: What was your role in Brazil’s Ministry of Justice? Please give an example of a project you worked on.

Estela Aranha

Estela Aranha: I started as special advisor to the minister of justice for digital affairs. Later, I was appointed secretary of digital rights. One project that I helped coordinate, along with other departments in the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, was called Operation Safe Schools, which was created to prevent school massacres.

In March 2023, a series of attacks and random child murders began in schools across the country, and thousands of school massacre threats vitalized in the social media. This created a generalized mood of panic and hysteria. Users were spreading images of school attackers with the goal of spreading terror. Consequently, increasing numbers of panicked parents pulled their children out of school.

In addition to spreading images of school killings, people were working online to encourage others to commit similar attacks. We began to monitor this phenomenon on the social media networks, and our initial analysis showed that neo-Nazi groups were encouraging attacks on April 20, because it was the anniversary of Columbine, and the Columbine massacre was committed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. They were contacting children and teenagers online and trying to encourage them to attack other children in schools.

It was a national issue that paralyzed the country. In some cities during the week before April 20, only 20% of children were attending school because of the generalized sense of panic.

Operation Safe Schools worked in partnership with social media companies so that content inciting school killings would be properly moderated. We created a reporting channel. All reports were analyzed. The operation was huge, in terms of the number of people involved and the intelligence deployed.

We had very significant results, including 360 arrests. Not all, but the vast majority of people who were involved in these threats and these attacks, and who we had evidence would commit this type of crime—people who were arrested with detailed plans, weapons, masks, everything—were affiliated with clandestine neo-Nazi groups. Everyone who advocated Nazism was also reported to the police, and these individuals were detained and charged, according to due process, because advocating for Nazism is a crime in Brazil.

NPR (4/15/23)

BM: Did you ask social media companies to remove user profiles during this operation?

EA: Yes. We met with representatives from all the social media companies—we spoke with all of them. The only one that didn’t engage in dialogue was Telegram. During our the first meeting, Twitter initially resisted. It didn’t want to remove them. We were talking about profiles that were promoting very realistic attacks on schools.

I said, “I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorist personas. They are fake profiles using the names and faces of school massacre terrorists that post videos with songs that say, ‘I’m going to get you kids, you can’t run faster than my gun.’ There are video clips that show the terrorist’s picture and then show real school massacres.”

The Twitter representative said that this did not violate their terms of use. After strong push-back from the minister of justice and social pressure, including from users of its own platform, Twitter changed its policy and collaborated with the investigation.

BM: Do you think there was a positive effect in de-platforming those people? Did it reduce the risk for children?

EA: Of course. These were people sharing videos promoting and glorifying the perpetrators of school massacres. Imagine a teenager who already has issues and suffers from bullying, who is bombarded with images glorifying school massacres and messages like, “Look, this guy is awesome. Look what he did!”

Some kids will say, “Great. Nobody respects me, I don’t know what to do, so I’ll do this to be respected.”

All the guys who were arrested, who left letters or made statements, summed it up like this: “I was despised, nobody cared about me. I’m going to do this to show that I’m tough, that I’m somebody.”

They thought they were doing it to get revenge, to be glorified, to be seen differently. Any material that glorifies terrorism, whether it’s a school attack or any kind of terrorist attack, leads some people to think it’s good to commit a terrorist act. This is scientifically proven, by the way.

The other thing about this wave of school massacre threats is that it created an atmosphere of fear. If you logged onto Twitter or any social network at the time, started seeing these crimes, these scenes, how were you going to send your children to school? We had many parents who kept their children out of school during the whole three weeks of the crisis.

Imagine the impact on people’s lives without being able to send their children to school. Imagine the mothers who depend on sending their children to school in order to work, to have a normal life. There were thousands of testimonies of children crying, saying, “I’m going to be stabbed at school.”

Imagine the psychological impact—school should be a safe place for children, right? Imagine a parent who browses on any social network like Twitter and sees a bunch of people promoting terrorism in schools. What parent would send their child to school after that? What child would feel comfortable and want to go to school? This created an impact on the entire Brazilian society. Mothers couldn’t work and daughters were terrified to go to school. School ceased to be a place where children felt safe—they started to be afraid of it.

BM: How did you discover that Michael Shellenberger was lying in the so-called “Twitter Files”?

EA: I am lawyer and digital rights specialist, and I began working in the Justice Ministry shortly after the period from which the emails used in “Twitter Files Brazil” were selected. I am familiar with all of those cases and decisions. I am familiar with all the rulings in my field that are in circulation. As a lawyer who is part of a group who specializes in this area—and they’re aren’t many of us—we obviously share, discuss and debate all of these cases and rulings. I remember the case filed by the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter, because we all talked about it when it happened.

So when I read the email excerpts that Michael Shellenberger posted, I immediately saw that they had been manipulated. I immediately knew what decision each email fragment referred to. I am familiar with all the important rulings on social media networks that happened during the time period of the emails. The moment I saw it I thought, “No, that never happened,” because I follow this very closely—it’s my job.

When I read it, I said to myself, “This is wrong.” He was speaking incorrectly, and this is why I complained about it online. I knew they had fabricated a false narrative, because I know all of the cases that they cherry-picked their text fragments from. They stitched together excerpts. Anyone who doesn’t know what they’re referring to could believe them. But I know about all the cases, because I am a dedicated lawyer. There is no case in my area that I don’t study, in order to understand what is happening. There is nothing they presented in the “Twitter Files” that I hadn’t been closely following.

BM: Musk and Shellenberger are alleging that the Brazilian government is violating the right to freedom of expression. But it seems that the arguments they make are based on US law. What are some differences in freedom of expression laws between Brazil and the US?

EA: There are several universal rights in each country or region, and in each legal tradition. I will speak about Brazil. Both legislation and doctrinal legal tradition—the interpretation of doctrine, as well as jurisprudence—are very different here. The right to freedom of expression in the United States is a right that is held above other rights—it is broader.

My colleagues who know more about American law than me tell me that, for example, the United States has never managed to criminalize revenge porn—when you expose intimate data of a former partner from whom you separated. This speaks legions about the breadth of freedom of expression that exists in the United States. It is not absolute, but it is a very broad right.

In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights. If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations. All rights are weighed side by side, and there is proportionality in the scope of how much you can interfere.

For example, advocating for Nazism is illegal in Brazil, because it is considered to be such a harmful discourse that it must be preemptively prohibited. That doesn’t exist in the United States. Racist insults are crimes, as is discrimination against the LGBTQ+ population. There are several forms of speech that are illegal. And there are some types of speech that are not inherently illegal, but can lead to lawsuits for moral damages in certain cases.

This gradation obviously depends on the legal good that we are protecting. For example, advocacy for a crime, in general, is considered a form of criminal speech. So it is prohibited; it has to be taken out of circulation. Also, you cannot make threats.

Shellenberger mixes all kinds of unrelated things together in his “Twitter Files.” He mixes things from criminal cases, things from the São Paulo public prosecutors office, electoral crime investigations, and inquiries from the the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court.

Freedom of expression has many restrictions in our electoral law framework, because we have other values that take precedence—for example, the equilibrium of an election. We have laws guaranteeing balanced elections and integrity of the electoral system itself.

The practice that is common in the United States, of a candidate paying for a lot of campaign advertising, is not allowed in Brazil. There is a system of free electoral advertising space. It is pre-divided among the candidates. Candidates cannot take out any advertisements over their established time limits, even if they can pay for it.

The circulation of all campaign materials is highly regulated. There are spending caps on election campaigns. TV stations cannot give more airtime to favor one candidate over another. There always has to be equivalence.

It is clear that a tightly regulated election system like ours has rules to protect it. During our election seasons, which typically last for less than four months, governmental agencies pull information down from their websites, leaving nothing but emergency or public utility information, because otherwise it could interfere with the electoral process by favoring government officials who are running for office. This could interfere with the balance of the election. It is also illegal to run negative campaign adds.

There are a lot of rules that are very different from the United States. You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime in Brazil. If candidates make patently false statements, the media cannot replicate the information.

This always leads to a lot of electoral court rulings and, during 2022, they weren’t only made in favor of President Lula. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign successfully petitioned the court to remove several of Lula’s campaign ads and numerous social media posts by Lula supporters. There are thousands of court rulings demanding removal of advertising materials in every election campaign in Brazil. This is absolutely normal here.

But Micheal Shellenberger has decided to use US laws regarding freedom of expression to criticize decisions based on Brazilian law, made by our electoral courts. Shellenberger is using a totally different concept, which he even mentioned when he testified in a hearing in the Brazilian Senate this week. Advocacy for Nazism is tolerated in the United States. In Brazil, it is not. We have a very different system. He cannot use American legislation as a measuring rod to claim that a Brazilian court ruling is wrong.

There is a lot of deliberate confusion in “Twitter Files Brazil.” He grabs a lot of things and mixes them to create his narrative and arguments. He claimed that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter‘s lawyer, and then he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true. It’s obvious that he mixed different things together on purpose. It makes no sense to say that Moraes is breaking the law—he isn’t. His rulings are legal according to Brazilian law.

The other thing that I think is relevant to mention is that in Brazilian law, judges can order precautionary measures, that we call “atypical,” to prevent further threats to rights from materializing. This is what Alexandre de Moraes has used in some of his rulings. This institution of Brazilian law is called the general precautionary power of the judge.

BM: What do you think is the real goal of these attacks made by Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger and their allies?

Elon Musk (Creative Commons photo by Tim Reckmann)

EA: Shellenberger and Musk are working hand in hand, and I’m sure their goal is to be players in the US elections, and that’s why they have joined the international far right. Obviously they have chosen Brazil because it is also an important player in the international far right. They have taken advantage of all this discourse about regulating social media, which Musk obviously opposes. But I think their immediate goal is to attack the established powers in Brazil.

Our far right was completely isolated, because its main leader is Bolsonaro and he couldn’t lead, because he was cornered: the criminal investigations against him for crimes that have been proven, thanks to very robust investigations by the Federal Police. He was powerless, because the whole coup plot has been uncovered by the Federal Police. He really tried to implement a coup d’état, together with military leaders, and there were direct actions, like the attack on the Federal Police headquarters the day Lula arrived in Brasilia to sign documents in preparation for his inauguration.

This attack was very serious, but some people seem to have already forgotten it. I was there. I personally witnessed a car full of jerry cans filled with gasoline parked in front of a gas station, and later jerry cans full of gasoline were found in the hotel where Lula was staying. There was an attempted bombing in Brasilia airport on Christmas, which only failed to explode because the detonator didn’t work. Then we had the attack on January 8, which was also very serious.

So at the moment when were were managing to finally hold the main leaders of this attempted coup accountable, Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger came onto the scene to attack the institutions that are prosecuting them, to usurp their power so they can’t convict them anymore. That was clearly their short-term goal, and in the long run, Elon Musk obviously wants to be a player in the international far right, and interfere in elections around the world, especially in the US.

BM: Do you think they are trying to implement a coup?

EA: That’s part of it. The far right tried and never gave up on it. I was in the Ministry of Justice at the time, and we worked hard to contain the subversive elements that continued after January 8, 2023. After they began being held accountable, their activities decreased. But they want to reignite that flame by preventing Bolsonaro from being held accountable, by delegitimizing our court system. Of course, that’s part of the coup movement.

I think their first goal is to strengthen the far-right leadership again, because today they are weakened, they have no firepower to carry out this coup. That’s why they stepped in. They want to strengthen these leaders who are cornered, because they are being held responsible for the coup attempt.

This interview was originally posted on De-Linking Brazil (4/18/24), Brian Mier’s blog on Substack.

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April 18, 2024

ACTION ALERT: NYT’s War on Words: Avoid ‘Palestine,’ ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

A New York Times staffer told the Intercept (4/15/24) that the paper was “basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.”

New York Times editors issued a memo to staffers that warned against the use of “inflammatory language and incendiary accusations on all sides”—but the instructions offered by the memo, which was leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24), seemed designed to dampen criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and to reinforce the Israeli narrative of the conflict.

Among the terms the memo tells Times reporters to avoid: “Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied territories” (say “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”) and “refugee camps” (“refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas”).

These are all standard terms: “Palestine” is the name of a state recognized by the United Nations and 140 of its 193 members. The “occupied territories” are the way Gaza and the West Bank are referred to by the UN as well as the United States. “Refugee camps” are what they are called by the UN agency that administers the eight camps in Gaza.

The memo discourages the use of the terms “genocide” (“We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation”) and “ethnic cleansing” (“another historically charged term”).

Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention as certain “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The International Court of Justice ruled in January that it was “plausible” that Israel was in violation of the Genocide Convention (NPR, 1/26/24). A US federal judge has likewise held that “the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law” (Guardian, 2/1/24).

“Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in,” Netanyahu told a Likud ally (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23) “And we are working on it.” At the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to call this “ethnic cleansing.”

“Ethnic cleansing” does not have a legal definition, but surely the Israeli military campaign that has displaced 85% of Gaza’s population, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises he is “working on” the “voluntary emigration” of that population (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23), qualifies under any reasonable standard.

In contrast to its take on “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” the memo contends that “it is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7″; the words “fighters” or “militants,” however, are discouraged for participants in those attacks. This is the opposite of the approach taken by outlets like AP (X, formerly Twitter, 1/7/21) and the BBC (10/11/23); John Simpson, world affairs editor for the latter, calls “terrorism” a “loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally.”

Also on the Times‘ list of approved language: “the deadliest attack on Israel in decades.” Reporters are apparently not offered any superlatives to use to describe the Israeli assault on Gaza, such as “among the deadliest and most destructive in history” (AP, 12/21/23), or the most “rapid deterioration into widespread starvation” (Oxfam, 3/18/24), or “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).

“Our goal is to provide clear, accurate information, and heated language can often obscure rather than clarify the fact,” says the memo, written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling and international editor Philip Pan, along with their deputies. “Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice.” The memo asks, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?”

As FAIR noted in a new study (4/17/24), the Times does apply “heated language” in a decidedly lopsided manner. When Times articles used the word “brutal” to describe a party in the Gaza conflict, 73% of the time it was used to characterize Palestinians. An analysis by the Intercept (1/9/24) of Gaza crisis coverage in the Times (as well as the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) found that

highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.

“Horrific” was used by reporters and editors nine times as often to describe the killing of Israelis rather than Palestinians; “slaughter” described Israelis deaths 60 times more than Palestinian deaths, and “massacre” more than 60 times.

ACTION:

Please ask the New York Times to revise its guidance on coverage of the Gaza crisis so that it is no longer banning standard descriptions and placing the most accurate characterizations of Israeli actions off limits.

CONTACT:

Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Readers Center: Feedback

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Featured image: The New York Times Building (Creative Commons photo: Wally Gobetz)

The post ACTION ALERT: NYT’s War on Words: Avoid ‘Palestine,’ ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 17, 2024

‘Brutal’ Is a Word Mostly Reserved for Palestinian Violence

A FAIR study finds that since October 7, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have overwhelmingly applied the term “brutal” to violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. In doing so, journalists helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism, particularly in the early months of the onslaught.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been nothing if not “brutal.” The indiscriminate use of US-supplied artillery that shred Palestinian bodies and bury them alive under rubble has killed at least 33,000, mostly women and children. The blockade of food and water into Gaza has caused the sharpest decline of a population’s nutrition status on record. Marauding Israeli soldiers frequently post videos on social media (Al Jazeera, 1/18/24) mocking people whose homes they have destroyed, and in many cases have killed—playing with children’s toys, fondling women’s underwear (Mondoweiss, 2/19/24). The total variety of indignities that characterize the “brutal” human toll in Gaza are too numerous to summarize here.

But to US newspapers, brutality appears to be less about actions or outcomes than about identity.

Attributing ‘brutality’

FAIR recorded each instance in which the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal used the word “brutal” (or variants like “brutally,” “brutality” etc.) to characterize Palestinians or Israelis, over the five-month period from October 7 to March 7.

Using the search terms “brutal” and “Israel” in the Nexis and Factiva news archiving services, FAIR distinguished between characterizations made by sources and those in a journalist’s own voice. When the word was used by a source, FAIR noted their occupation. FAIR also noted if a “brutal” claim came in an opinion piece or a news story.

If an occurrence of “brutal” was not clearly attributed to a party in the conflict, it was labeled “unattributed” and not included in the data analysis. For instance, the statement “most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs” (Wall Street Journal, 11/6/23) does not clearly attribute “brutal” to a particular side. On the other hand, if a statement called both parties “brutal”—such as a Palestinian source’s statement, “Fear makes us brutal to each other” (New York Times, 1/31/24)—then it was counted as two instances, one for each party.

Total characterizations

Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions—even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.

Out of the 350 “brutal” mentions that were analyzed, 246 came from straight news stories—in quotes from sources and in journalists’ own words—while 104 came from op-eds. The lopsided rate at which “brutal” was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories: 77% of “brutal” mentions in news reports and 77% in op-eds were applied to Palestinians.

That publications were just as likely to describe Palestinians, as opposed to Israelis, as “brutal” in a straight news story versus an op-ed indicates a blurred distinction between these categories. Describing violent actors or their actions as “brutal,” after all, is an opinion, not a fact. That opinion may be well-justified, but it remains subjective.

The New York Times, in fact, distributed an internal memo in November (leaked to the Intercept, 4/15/24) instructing reporters to refrain from using “incendiary” language in their reporting on the war on Gaza, because “heated language can often obscure rather than clarify.” The memo highlighted the risks of double standards, asking, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?”

Our study found a clear pattern of the tendentious word “brutal” being applied overwhelmingly to one side of the conflict, supporting the concerns that Times staffers expressed to the Intercept that the memo—which also prohibited the use of the term “occupied territory”—reflected a deference to Israeli talking points under the guise of journalistic objectivity.

Reflexive inoculation

It took until the week of November 25 for the Times and December 2 for the Post to publish more characterizations of Israel as “brutal” than of Palestinians in a week. But that inversion only happened a few more times. From that point on, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to over 30,000 and children began to die not just from bombs but also famine, the frequency of “brutal” characterizations at the two papers dropped overall, and Palestinians were still more likely than Israel to be called “brutal” each week.

Meanwhile, as “brutal” references diminished at the Journal as well, there was virtually no shift in its application. From the week of December 9 through the end of the collection period, the Journal only characterized Israel’s actions as “brutal” once—versus seven times for Palestinian actions.

Much of the imbalance has to do with how often journalists reflexively—and lazily—inject “brutal” into phrases like “in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel” (e.g., New York Times, 10/30/23, 1/2/24) or “following Hamas’s brutal assault” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/17/23, 10/19/23). Reporters seemed to want to inoculate themselves against charges of being insufficiently anti-Hamas, while at the same time giving their audience the semblance of context.

BBC (2/29/24)

We now know that some of the most horrific atrocity claims that came out of Israel following the October 7 attack were fabrications or embellishments: There were no beheaded babies (FAIR.org, 3/8/24), there’s no evidence of systematic rape by Hamas (Electronic Intifada, 1/9/24; Intercept, 2/28/24) and at least some of the bodies burned beyond recognition—both Israeli and Palestinian—were killed by Israeli weapons (FAIR.org, 2/23/24).

But assume that journalists didn’t know this. Isn’t Israel’s well-documented intent to collectively punish the entire 2.2 million person population of Gaza through indiscriminate bombing and starvation, killing more children under the age of 10 than the number of people (soldiers and civilians) killed in total in the October 7 attack, at least equally deserving of the label “brutal”?

That top US newspapers have used the term more than three times as much to describe Palestinian actions than Israeli ones—a cruel inversion of the actual death toll of the conflict—illustrates that their humanitarian concerns are not universal.

Consider the actual meaning of “brutal,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “suitable to one who lacks intelligence, sensitivity or compassion: befitting a brute,” and “typical of beasts.” These newspapers’ selective use of the word echoes Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that Palestinians are “human animals.”

‘Brutal’ attack, ‘massive’ response

This New York Times editorial (11/25/23) referred to “the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza.”

Statements characterizing the October 7 attack as “brutal” were often followed by neutral descriptions of the Israeli assault, even in articles ostensibly concerned with the Palestinian situation.

A piece by the Times’ editorial board called “The Only Way Forward” (11/25/23), for example, laid out the paper’s view of how to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict. It used “brutal” to describe Palestinian actions, but the more neutral “massive” to describe Israeli ones:

The brutal attack by Hamas on October 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction, and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond.

The Post (11/27/23) used a similar frame:

Israel has mounted a massive assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip, killing more than 13,000—including thousands of children—since October 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a brutal cross-border assault on Israel, killing about 1,200 people—including dozens of children—and taking about 240 people into Gaza as hostages.

Note that the assault that by the Post‘s own reckoning killed two orders of magnitude more children was not the one that the paper thought deserved the label “brutal.”

The Journal (10/17/23) used the same frame in an op-ed headlined “Israel Must Follow the Laws Hamas Violates: But the Jewish State Isn’t Culpable for Its Enemy’s Using Gazans as Human Shields”:

The brutal slaughter of Israeli civilians has thrown Hamas’s advocates on the defensive, but if Israel is blamed for massive civilian casualties, this could change.

These statements, which range from stale lamentations of the conflict’s death toll to purely aesthetic concern for Israel’s public image, seem sympathetic at first blush. In fact, they really act as a sort of stress-test for the dehumanizing logic underpinning Western reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, especially in the first few months after October 7.

In these cases, affective language is still only applied to Palestinian, not Israeli, violence. The extreme gore in Gaza that the world bears daily witness to apparently did not warrant a description as emotive as “brutal.” And whatever concern these publications may have for Israel’s victims isn’t enough for them to openly question, in a meaningful and timely way, whether Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas is its actual one.

Describing Israel’s actions as a “response” to “brutal” Palestinians helps paint a picture in readers’ minds that the scale of destruction in Gaza is an unfortunate but natural result of the October 7 Hamas attack—as though Israeli forces hadn’t killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 2,000 children, prior to October 7 in the 21st century. Add to this the logic of the “human shields” excuse, and it suggests that there’s no Palestinian death toll high enough to merit rhetorical condemnation from these publications.

‘A brutal, ugly, inhumane people’

The sources quoted by the Times, Post and Journal, when they called one side of the conflict “brutal,” were talking about Palestinians 64% of the time. But that was less lopsided than when reporters for those papers were applying the term in their own voice—when they used “brutal” 83% of the time in reference to Palestinians.

The Times, which urged its journalists not to use emotional phrases in their own voice, or “even in quotations”—suggesting there might be more leeway in such an instance–once again did not follow its own guidelines. When the paper used the term “brutal,” reporters applied it to Palestinian actors or actions 79% of the time when writing in their own journalistic voice, and 61% of the time in quotations.

Wall Street Journal editors (12/14/23) said President Joe Biden was “right to say” that “Hamas” was “a brutal, ugly, inhumane people” who “have to be eliminated.”

Two categories of sources were the most frequently quoted: foreign government officials and US government officials, which made up 28% and 27% of total sources, respectively. Quotes from foreign government officials were roughly evenly split between calling Palestinians and Israelis “brutal.” These sources included Israeli Defense Force officials, on the one hand, who made statements like “Hamas seeks to deliberately cause the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians” (Washington Post, 11/10/23). On the other hand, President Lula Da Silva of Brazil (New York Times, 2/18/24) remarked on Israel’s actions, “I have never seen such brutal, inhumane violence against innocent people.”

Quotes from US government officials included statements from President Joe Biden (Wall Street Journal, 12/14/23): “Nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” National security advisor Jake Sullivan (New York Times, 11/28/23) described Hamas as the “architects” of a “brutal, bloody massacre.”

The only two US government sources to call Israelis “brutal” were Sen. Bernie Sanders (Washington Post, 1/4/24), who called Israeli violence an “illegal, immoral, brutal and grossly disproportionate war against the Palestinian people,” and the White House interns who issued a statement (Wall Street Journal, 12/8/23) saying they were “horrified” by both the “brutal October 7 Hamas attack” and “the brutal and genocidal response by the Israeli government.”

As FAIR (3/18/22) has noted, the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated Western media’s capacity to cover civilian suffering with sensitivity and empathy—when that suffering is caused by an official US enemy. But with military campaigns waged by the US and its allies, media’s humanitarian concerns tend to fade. The uneven deployment of “brutal” seems like a clear case of Western media not just shielding a US ally from justifiable criticism, but actively inciting public hatreds of Palestinians by portraying their violence as exceptionally inhumane despite paling in comparison to that of their colonial oppressor.

Research assistance: Phillip HoSang

The post ‘Brutal’ Is a Word Mostly Reserved for Palestinian Violence appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 15, 2024

‘Interventions Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis in Haiti Today’CounterSpin interview with Chris Bernadel on Haiti

Janine Jackson interviewed Black Alliance for Peace’s Chris Bernadel about Haiti for the April 12, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Chicago Tribune (3/27/24)

Janine Jackson: Columnist Clarence Page reflects US liberal media’s understanding of Haiti with a piece headlined “Haiti’s Tragic History Just Keeps Repeating Itself.” “The Biden administration,” Page writes, “shows little appetite to become deeply immersed in perennially troubled Haiti.” And “it’s no secret that many Americans have grown weary of trying to solve too many of the world’s problems.”

The Hill notes that more than 5 million Haitians, out of a population of 11 million, are at stage three and four levels of hunger—the fifth stage being famine. The US, described as “one of the largest donors for Haiti,” is reporting difficulties in delivering aid, but bravely plans “no change in strategy to address the crisis.”

A piece in the Plain Dealer suggests why we should care: Haiti’s “economic, social and environmental meltdown” is “sure to reach our shores.”

So, yes, you can learn something about Haiti’s current crisis, and the US view of it, from the news media. What you won’t learn about are the roots of the crisis, much less how they can be traced back to the US.

Chris Bernadel works with the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team and the Haitian grassroots organization MOLEGHAF. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chris Bernadel.

Chris Bernadel: Thank you for having me; I’m glad to be here.

JJ: The first, if not the only, thing that many US citizens will take away from media coverage about Haiti today is that “gang violence” is terrorizing the capital, Port-au-Prince. But when Americans think about gangs, their image is generally of poor, young, probably urban people, disaffected, unemployed, who are just grabbing whatever weapons they can and sticking up people on the street for money and for kicks. But that doesn’t really properly convey who the gangs right now in Haiti are, or where they come from, does it?

CB: No, not at all. And in the history of Haiti, there have been a number of times when armed groups have been involved in the political situation. These armed groups, or paramilitaries, as I like to call them, are funded by the ruling elite of Haitian society, the ruling elite that controls the ports, families like the Bigio family, and they’re made up of many of the young men from the poorest areas of the Haitian capital and other parts of Haiti. But many of the members and leadership of these groups are former police, former military; some of them have military training. So to call them gangs is a mistake. And I would say the proper characterization is paramilitary groups, armed groups, and they’re carrying out the interests of the ruling Haitian financial elite who have controlled Haiti’s economy for a long time.

JJ: Haiti doesn’t manufacture guns, right? So the guns are coming from somewhere else.

CB: Exactly. The guns are coming from the United States. Most are coming through Miami, through these privately owned ports, or ports that are owned by these wealthy families, and they’re being disseminated around the poor neighborhoods in order to try to carry out the political objectives of different sections of Haiti’s ruling elite. So they’ll arm one group to attack another group, and they’ll have groups protect certain areas and not go into other areas. But these armed paramilitary groups, for the most part, are carrying out the interests of the ruling elite.

The Hill (4/3/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the so-called political landscape. The Caribbean Community and Common Market, CARICOM, has put forth a proposal for a transitional government that The Hill, just for one example, says “will be key to efforts to put Haiti on the path to restore security and wrestle control back from the gangs.”

You’ve already complicated the “gangs” part of that, but what is the response of Haiti advocates to this CARICOM proposal, both what it says and the way it came about?

CB: This CARICOM proposal is a new face for the same process, the same kind of thing that’s been going on. The main issue with Haiti, the main problem in Haiti, are not these armed groups, not these paramilitaries, as is being portrayed. The main problem continues to be what it’s been, specifically, since the 2004 coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

So the main problem in Haiti is the international community, the so-called Core Group, US foreign policy implementing their will in Haiti, and not allowing for Haitian society to develop a government and a civil society that serves their interest and their needs. The constant interventions, starting with the MINUSTAH intervention in 2004 that lasted into 2017, which pretty much laid the ground for the crisis we have in Haiti today. That situation removed all of what was left of a legitimate Haitian government. We went from a period where we had around 7,000 elected officials to today, where we have zero elected officials in power.

Politico (5/4/15)

We’ve gone from one version of the PHTK to another to another, first one being delivered to us by Hillary Clinton, when she flew into Haiti to ensure that Michel Martelly would be able to pursue the presidency, and then followed by Jovenel Moïse, and then with Ariel Henry. And now that they’ve forced Ariel Henry to step down, in order to implement this transitional council, we’re seeing more of the same. These are the same political actors, the same political class that the Haitian people have shown time and time again they do not trust, and they see them as foreign actors, people acting on the behalf of foreign interests.

JJ: I know that a lot of listeners don’t know the deep history of US intervention in Haiti, and international intervention in Haiti. I would ask them to look back to 1791 and George Washington’s promise to help the French quell “the alarming insurrection of the Negroes.” Or they can look up the 1915-to-1934 occupation, or right up to the 2015 Politico headline calling Bill and Hillary Clinton “The King and Queen of Haiti.”

But it is, of course, as you’re saying, the 2004 coup—the role of that can’t be overstated. And I guess what I want to say is, if you have an illegitimate result, an illegal action, and then that leads to other illegal actions, it doesn’t get cleansed along the way because the facts on the ground change. There is no way to understand Haiti’s present without understanding its history.

Chris Bernadel: “The problem in Haiti is…the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises.” (image: The Narrative)

CB: Exactly. And the problem in Haiti is the socioeconomic problem, as far as the structure of Haiti’s economy, the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises and carry out the interest of the Core Group, primarily France, Canada, the United States. And also, the United States, using the 2019 Global Fragility Act, has plans to carry out further intervention in Haiti, and to further diminish the sovereignty of the Haitian people, by implementing more unelected governments, putting people into position without any legitimacy, without any constitutional reasoning, without any constitutional legality, they’re putting these people into office.

And what’s even more outrageous, now that the CARICOM community is acting in the same way that the Core Group has been acting in Haiti, they placed a requirement on all members of this so-called transitional council, where they must accept foreign military intervention in order to be a part of this council.

So this council is a US idea, and is being dictated by the United States and the State Department, as well as CARICOM, and it’s not in the interest of the Haitian people. The Haitian people have already rejected many of these actors that are taking seats on this council. A requirement to be in this Transitional Council, who will be selecting the next leader, the de facto leader of Haiti, is to accept this foreign military occupation, this occupation that the US has been trying to arrange, that has been characterized by some as a “UN intervention,” but it is not a UN intervention.

The UN won’t be sending in anyone. The US got the Security Council to rubber stamp this Kenyan police force that they’re funding to come into the country.

And so with the disaster that was the MINUSTAH occupation of 2004 to 2017, where they unleashed cholera into the country and killed over 10,000 people, as many as 30,000 people, killed by cholera released into the country by UN peacekeepers, so-called.

Now the US, for this intervention that they’re planning, it won’t even be a UN force officially. So whatever accountability that came along with a UN force being sent to the country, now that won’t even be there.

They were attempting to get a Kenyan force brought into the country, and they’ve faced some roadblocks with that, political and logistical, I’m sure. And now they are propping up this council to cover up for what they were trying to do under Ariel Henry, which they now see wasn’t possible. They’re trying to do the same thing now under this council that they’re controlling.

JJ: With the Global Fragility Act, supposedly it’s about countries that are “prone to instability” or something—I don’t know what the language says—without any understanding of what it is that is introducing instability to these places. And this is a new face. But what I hear you saying is, it’s a new face on an old story. Really, it’s the same thing.

CB: Exactly right. So-called fragile states, countries prone to instability, conflict and poverty, are being framed as threats to US security. And the Global Fragility Act is a means for them to more easily send out their resources and institutions from the Defense Department, the State Department, USAID and the Treasury, so-called international allies and partners, to deal with these situations.

Democracy Now! (3/11/24)

So this is just a new form of what they did in 1915, when they invaded the country and had to come up with excuses and reasons to cover up their real motivations. Same thing in 2004, when they did the coup d’etat against Aristide. And now again, we’re seeing the same type of intervention into Haitian politics, Haitian society, where the Haitian people, the masses of Haitian people, who for years have been coming out into the streets demanding a transition to a democratic government that represents their interest, the United States and their allies are doing the same thing they’ve been doing this whole time, implementing a foreign force, implementing foreign control over Haitian government and policy. And the results won’t be any different.

Now what we’re seeing with the so-called gangs, what we call armed groups and paramilitaries, are another way to find a reason to intervene into the country. But it’s not just as simple as that, because the dynamics of Haitian society, where you have a tiny ruling class propped up by this international community, but that really runs things from the shadows, and plays the role of doing the dirty business for the US, for the imperialist powers of the world, to control and dominate Haitian society. They have, in the past and today, found it convenient to fund armed groups, desperate young men in poor neighborhoods, but also, like I mentioned earlier, people who come from the military or the former military, people who come from the police, to enact their interest and will in this situation.

JJ: I think folks are going to read media, and they’re going to hear talk about the transitional committee and government, and all of these machinations, as being about supporting Haitian sovereignty. And “sovereignty” is thrown around with reference to officials who have been essentially appointed or installed by the US and international powers. And so every time we talk about “sovereignty” in Haiti, we’re kind of reifying this fiction of what’s going on, yeah? It’s deeply misleading.

CB: Yes, that’s exactly right. They did this with Ariel Henry, where they propped up Ariel Henry for months and months and months, even though the people of Haiti were demonstrating in the streets, coming out against every policy that he ever put out, coming out against the de facto ruler that was imposed on them that had no constitutional authority. And when they reached the end of that rope, when they saw that the situation had gone too far, and the armed groups had taken the step to actually keep Henry from reentering the country, they now have transitioned to a new strategy with this presidential council, or this transitional council, which will be more of the same.

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, what do real ways forward look like, and what must they include?

CB: Real ways forward must include the Haitian people being able to take control of this transition process. After the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, and even before that, like we spoke about before with the coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian government, the Haitian state, has been pretty much destroyed by foreign powers. And the Haitian people have the right to go through their own process, their own domestic process, to develop a solution.

Black Alliance for Peace (2/24/24)

There are Haitian political organizations, like MOLEGHAF, who are on the ground, working with workers, students, people in the neighborhoods affected by some of this violence. There are other organizations throughout the country.

And another thing, as well: Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. There are many other regions where the security situation is not the same, but the political and economic situation, due to the situation in the capital Port-au-Prince, is deteriorating. But not the entire country is in the same situation as Port-au-Prince.

But the Haitian people have the will and the right to work through their own process, to come up with a transition to get back to a constitutional government and a sovereign democratic state, where they can make decisions for themselves.

So it’s up to us, allies of the Haitian people, to call out the US, to see through their different tactics, like what they want to do with the Global Fragility Act, what they’ve been doing with this transitional council, their plans to bring Kenyan troops into Haiti as a blackface cover for US imperialism. We have to call them out. We have to hold them accountable, and we also have to support organizations in Haiti like MOLEGHAF. And we have to support the Haitian people in general, to allow them the space to develop a transition, to develop a solution to these problems. And they can do it.

The United States, the foreign powers, the Core Group will continue to intervene and try to control the process. But as we’ve seen, things have gotten out of hand; they can’t predict what’s going to happen next and they can’t control the situation. So they’re trying to look for new versions of the same solution they’ve always proposed to the situation, which is them dominating.

So now the Haitian people have an opportunity to develop their own processes, their own solutions, and it’s going to be up to them. All we can do is keep the US government out of it and try our best to keep the US government from overthrowing whatever democratic, sovereign form of Haitian government that can come out of that process.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team, as well as MOLEGHAF, a Haitian grassroots organization. You can find information about what we’re talking about online at BlackAllianceForPeace.com. Chris Bernadel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: You’re welcome.

The post ‘Interventions Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis in Haiti Today’ CounterSpin interview with Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 12, 2024

Chris Bernadel on Haiti

Washington Post (3/25/24)

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial: “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the US “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

Or, well, there is one answer: The Washington Post made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

At this point, the Austin American-Statesman’s “Haiti Cannibalism Claims Unfounded” might pass for refreshing.

AP had a piece that actually talked to Haitians amid what is indeed a deep and deepening crisis. A grandmother told the wire service, “We’re living day-by-day and hoping that something will change.”

We talk about what has to change—including, importantly, Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history—with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk vs. Brazil.

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April 11, 2024

Musk Is Consistent in His Opposition to Internet Democracy

“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.

Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.

As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.

It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”

The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”

Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”

Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”

‘Par for the course’

Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”

Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).

Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.

The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.

Grappling with balance

AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”

The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).

Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).

The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”

While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).

Despotic future

Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”

Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:

Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.

Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.

Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.

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April 10, 2024

‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman about the Boeing scandal for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CNN (3/25/24)

Janine Jackson: Boeing CEO David Calhoun is going to “step down in wake of ongoing safety problems,” as headlines have it, or amid “737 MAX struggles,” or elsewhere “mishaps.”

Had you or I at our job made choices, repeatedly, that took the lives of 346 people and endangered others, I doubt media would describe us as “stepping down amid troubles.” But crimes of capitalism are “accidents” for the corporate press, while the person stealing baby formula from the 7/11 is a bad person, as well as a societal danger.

There are many reasons that corporate news media treat corporate crime differently than so-called “street crime,” but none of them are excuses we need to accept.

Public Citizen looks at the same events and information that the press does, but from a bottom-up, people-first perspective. We’re joined now by the president of Public Citizen; welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Weissman.

Robert Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

JJ: Boeing is a megacorporation. It has contractors across the country and federal subsidies out the wazoo, but when it does something catastrophic, somehow this one guy stepping down is problem solved? What happened here versus what, from a consumer-protection perspective, you think should have happened, or should happen?

RW: Well, I think the story is still being written. Folks will remember that Boeing was responsible for two large airliner crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed around 350 people. The result of that, as a law enforcement matter, was that Boeing agreed to a leniency deal on a single count of fraud. It didn’t actually plead guilty; it just stipulated that the facts might be true, and promised that they would follow the law in the future. That agreement was concluded in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Fast forward, people will remember the recent disaster with another Boeing flight for Alaska Airlines earlier this year, when a door plug came untethered and people were jeopardized. Luckily, no one was fatally injured in that disaster.

But the disaster itself was exactly a consequence of Boeing’s culture of not attending to safety, a departure from the historic orientation of the corporation, and, from our point of view, directly a result of the slap-on-the-wrist leniency agreement that they had entered after the gigantic crashes of just a few years prior.

So now the Department of Justice is looking at this problem again. They are criminally investigating Boeing for the most recent problem with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. And we are encouraging, and we think they are, looking back at the prior agreement, because the prior agreement said, if Boeing engages in other kinds of wrongdoing in the future, the Department of Justice can reopen the original case and prosecute them more fully–which it should have done, of course, in the initial instance.

Public Citizen (3/25/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the DoJ. I’m seeing this new report from Public Citizen about federal corporate crime prosecutions, which we think would be entertained in this case, and particularly a careful look back at choices, conscious choices, made by the company that resulted in these harms. And this report says the DoJ is doing slightly more in terms of going after corporate offenders, but maybe nothing to write home about.

RW: Right. There was a very notable shift in rhetoric from the top of the DoJ at the start of the Biden administration, and not the normal thing you would hear. Much more aggressive language about corporate crime, and holding corporations accountable, and holding CEOs and executives accountable.

However, that rhetoric hasn’t been matched in good policymaking, and we had the lowest levels of corporate criminal enforcement in decades in the first year of the administration. We gave them a pass on that, because that was mostly carrying forward with cases that were started, or not started, under the Trump administration. But we’ve only seen a slow uptick in the last couple years. So it has increased from its previous low, but by historic standards, it’s still at a very low level, in terms of aggregate number of corporate criminal prosecutions.

By the way, if people are wondering, what numbers are we talking about, we’re talking about 113. So very, very few corporate criminal prosecutions, as compared to the zillions of prosecutions of individuals, as you rightly juxtaposed at the start.

JJ: And then even, historically, there were more corporate crime prosecutions 20 years ago, and it’s not like the world ended. It didn’t drive the economy into the ground. This is a thing that can happen.

Robert Weissman: “There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy.”

RW: Correct. The corporate criminal prosecutions don’t end the world, and moreover, corporate crime didn’t end. So we ought to have more prosecutions than we have now. I mean, we’re just talking about companies following the law. This is not about aggressive measures to hold them accountable for things that are legal but are wrong, which is, of course, pervasive. This is just a matter of following the law. There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy. It doesn’t diminish the ability of capitalism to carry out what it does. In fact, following the rule of law, for anyone who actually cares about a well-functioning capitalist society, should be a pretty core principle, and enforcement of law should be a core requirement.

JJ: And one thing that I thought notable, also, in this recent report is that small businesses are more likely to face prosecution. And that reminds me of the IRS saying, “Well, yeah, we go after low-income people who get the math wrong on their taxes, because rich people’s taxes are really complicated, you guys.” So there’s a way that even when the law is enforced, it’s not necessarily against the biggest offenders.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. Although the numbers are so small, that disparity isn’t quite that stark. I think the big thing that illustrates your point, though, is the entirely different way that corporate crime is treated than crime by individual offenders, street offenders.

First of all, the norm for many years has been reliance on leniency agreements. So not even plea deals, where a corporation pleads down, or a person might plea down the crime to which they are admitting guilt. But a no-plea deal, in which they just say, “Hey, we promise to follow the law going forward in the future, and if we do, you won’t prosecute us for the thing that we did wrong in the past.”

Human beings do not get those kinds of deals, except rarely, in the most low-level offenses. But that’s been the norm for corporations, for pervasive offenses with mass impacts on society, sometimes injured persons, and instances where the corporations, of course, are very intentional about what they’re doing, because it’s all designed based on risk/benefit decisions about how to make the most profit. The sentences and the punishments for corporations in the criminal space and for CEOs in the criminal space are just paltry.

JJ: So if deterrence, really genuinely preventing these kinds of things from happening again, if that were really the goal, then the process would look different.

RW: It would look radically different. I think that there’s a lot of data when it comes to so-called street crime. You need enforcement, obviously, against real wrongdoing, but tough penalties don’t actually work for deterrence. It’s just not what the system is, in terms of the social system and the cultural system, people deciding to follow or not follow the law and so on.

But for corporations, deterrence is everything. They are precisely profit-maximizing. They’re the ultimate rational actors. If the odds are good that they will be caught breaking the law and suffer serious penalties, then they will follow the law, almost to a T. So this is the space where deterrence actually would work, and we see criminal deterrence with aggressive enforcement and tough penalties really missing from the scene.

And this Boeing case is the perfect example. The company was responsible, through its lax safety processes, for two crashes that killed 350-plus people; they got off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, they didn’t really feel pressure to change what they were doing, and they put people at risk again. If they had been penalized in that first instance, I think you would’ve seen a radical shift in the company, much more adoption of a safety culture. We would have avoided this most recent mishap.

Seattle Times (2/26/24)

JJ: Let me, finally, just bring media back in. There was this damning report from the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and the reporting language across press accounts kind of incensed me.

This is just the Seattle Times: “A highly critical report,” they said, “said Boeing’s push to improve its safety culture has not taken hold at all levels of the company.” “The report,” the paper said, “cites ‘a disconnect’ between the rhetoric of Boeing’s senior management about prioritizing safety and how frontline employees perceive the reality.”

Well, this is Corporate Crime 101. I mean, there are books written on this. It’s not a disconnect: “Oh, the company’s at war with itself; leadership really wants safety really badly, but the workers just aren’t getting it.”

This is pushing accountability down and maintaining deniability at the top. So the CEO doesn’t have to say, “Oh, don’t follow best practices here.” They just need to say, “Well, we just need to cut costs this quarter,” and everybody understands what that means. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation understands what “corporate climate” means.

And so I guess my hopes for appropriate media coverage dim a little bit when there is so much pretending that we don’t know how decision-making works in corporations, that we don’t know how corporations work, when I know that reporters do.

RW: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that is so 100% correct in characterizing what happened at Boeing, because not only is that fake, and obviously culture is set from the top, this is a place where the culture of the workers and the engineers wants to, and long did, prioritize safety. They’re the ones who’ve been calling attention to all the problems. So it’s management that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, which is what they want to do.

Public Citizen (3/18/19)

I think in terms of how media talks about this, I agree with your point, and I think the reporting on Boeing has been pretty good in terms of documenting what happened. But what is often missing from even really good reports in mainstream news media is the criminal justice frame.

Now, admittedly, that partially follows from the failure of the Department of Justice to treat it as a criminal matter seriously, but I think it does change the way people think about this stuff. If you call it a crime, it’s exactly as you said, it’s not errors, it’s not just lapses. It’s certainly not mistakes. These are crimes, and they’re crimes with really serious consequences, in this case, hundreds of people dying.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. You can find their work on Boeing and many, many other issues online at citizen.org. Robert Weissman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

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April 5, 2024

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone

Popular Information (4/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’

Photo: Elvert Barnes

Also on the show: While much else is happening, we can’t lose sight of the ongoing assault on reproductive freedom, in other words basic human rights, being given tailwind by the Supreme Court. Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at NBC’s unhiring of Ronna McDaniel.

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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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April 2, 2024

‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’: CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution

Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about the Gaza ceasefire resolution for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Reuters (3/22/24)

Janine Jackson: Reuters reported on March 22 that the United Nations Security Council had rejected a resolution, proposed by the US, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a hostage deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. Russia and China vetoed the measure, readers were told, while Algeria also voted no and Guyana abstained on a measure that “called for an immediate and sustained ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cited in AP, said that the US had been “working on a hostage deal for months” that would call for a “six-week period of calm,” from which, she said, “we could then take the time and the steps to build a more enduring peace.” Well, what does that wording mean, and what do UN resolutions generally mean, if politicians and news media interpret them variously?

So helping us to sift through these attempts to respond to the violence of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is Phyllis Bennis; she’s senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international advisor to Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: So the US introduced a resolution at the UN, nominally calling for a ceasefire, but also vetoed another resolution calling for a ceasefire, because, Thomas-Greenfield said, it would interfere with negotiations around freeing Israeli hostages. And then there’s this effort to portray the current decision as non-binding. It’s very confusing, especially for laypeople. Does the US want a real ceasefire or not? What’s happening here?

Al Jazeera (5/19/21)

PB: You raise all the right questions, Janine. The real issue has to do with the US view of the United Nations, which is that it’s annoying at best and a threat to US domination at worst, from Washington’s vantage point. So that earlier veto by Russia and China and opposition by Algeria, the abstention by Guyana, of the US resolution came after a history, a long history that goes back years, in fact, of the US vetoing calls for a ceasefire in situations when Israel is attacking, mostly Gaza, on occasion Lebanon, and the Security Council calls for a ceasefire, and the US says, “No, we don’t need a ceasefire yet.” Always meaning, “We haven’t killed enough people yet.” So there’s a long history of that. We don’t really have time to go into that.

But the US did it twice in a row on the Gaza question, where there were proposals for a ceasefire that the US vetoed, which would’ve passed. The US refused. Then the US comes up with its own resolution, which was a very, very sneaky one, because that quote that you read about what it says, those words were indeed in the resolution, but it did not call for them. The resolution did not call for an immediate ceasefire. There was a recognition by the Security Council, according to this resolution, that a ceasefire would be a good idea, and then went on to say and therefore the Security Council should go on cheerleading—they didn’t use that word—but saying should support the US-controlled negotiations that are already underway in Qatar.

So it was a fake resolution. That’s why others did not like it, and weren’t willing to accept it as if it were an actual call. In international law, which is very complicated in a lot of ways, but certain parts of it are pretty clear. One of the parts that’s pretty clear, Article 25 of the UN Charter, says that all decisions, all resolutions, passed by the Security Council are international law. They’re all binding. That’s what the real world of international law says.

So when a resolution is passed, it needs to say the Security Council demands a ceasefire, period, full stop. If it talks about how the Security Council recognizes that such and such would be a good idea, that’s nothing to be binding on, right? That’s just a statement of what we think is nice.

Common Dreams (3/25/24)

So that’s what was distinctive, the new resolution that was passed just a few days ago that the United States was willing to allow to be passed, 14-to-0, with one abstention—the US abstained rather than vetoing it; that was a great step forward. And that one, crucially, did call for an immediate ceasefire, and it also called for release of all the hostages and compliance with international law in the treatment of all those detained by all sides, which is a clear reference to the Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding. And it also, crucially, demanded lifting all barriers to the massive amount of humanitarian assistance that’s desperately needed as famine is moving across Gaza. So that was a huge shift.

At the same time, the US had weakened it in many ways. It removed the word “permanent” from the description of the ceasefire it was demanding, and said, “We just want a ‘lasting’ ceasefire”; nobody knows what that means. And, crucially, the other weakness was that the ceasefire is only called for for two weeks. It said that the ceasefire should last for the month of Ramadan, but it was passed two weeks into Ramadan, so there’s only about two weeks left, so that’s way too short. And there’s other limitations as well. But it was a very significant shift in the US position, and it really speaks to how the Biden administration is hearing, if not yet fully responding to, but feeling like they have to answer, the demands of this rising movement that is so powerful across the United States and now globally, saying we need a ceasefire now, and we need access for massive amounts of humanitarian aid, without any of the barriers that Israel is putting up.

Those things are desperately needed, and what we’re looking at now is a question of how that movement is rising, what the impact could be on the elections, that’s one of the biggest pressure points for the Biden administration. If they want to win this election, they have to be seeing that the only way to do it is to change their policy on what has been, up until now, unconditional support for Israel.

With all the language about criticisms of Netanyahu, and the massive amount of press about how there’s this big divide between Biden and Netanyahu, between the US and Israel, that’s true only on the level of talking. On the level of acting, the US hasn’t changed a thing. $4 billion a year as a starting point of military aid; all the additional weapons that Israel wants, Israel gets.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24)

There’s just been no shift in the reality that the US is arming and financing a genocide, and as long as that’s underway, there’s people across this country that are mobilizing this “uncommitted” campaign, in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where those votes really matter, and it’s spreading. It’s about to happen in Wisconsin.

And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about the election, this is about what has to happen to stop this genocide. And I think what has to happen is that there has to be a way of convincing Joe Biden personally, not just others in his administration.

And right now, the pressure is rising, and the issue is going to be, how much longer can he keep up the political credibility, when he has people in his own administration resigning in protest of his policies? He has the staff of his own Biden/Harris campaign committee coming out with a public letter saying, “Mr. President, we can’t do our job. We can’t get you reelected with this policy.”

You have the White House interns. This is my personal favorite of all these protests. These are the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? And yet they’re willing to come out and say, “Mr. President, we are not leaders today, but we aspire to lead in the future, and we can’t do it with this kind of a model, when there is a genocide underway.”

So the US can do all it wants to say that this is a non-binding resolution, but that’s just not true. They can go out of their way to say that the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, that led to a finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide right now, or is moving towards a genocide, that that extraordinary brief prepared by the South African legal team somehow is “meritless.” They can claim that, but the rest of the world isn’t buying it, and increasingly US voters aren’t buying it.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I do see also just a lot of regular folks reading things like US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood calling for a “lengthy pause to this conflict” and saying, “Well, we’re not calling for a pause to the conflict. We’re calling for a resolution. We’re calling for a way forward.” And then you see with concerns about a wider war, we have folks like John Kirby, White House National Security Council, on the Today Show saying, “Well, we don’t want a wider war in the region, but we got to do what we have to do.”

This is terrifying, but I also feel like folks are seeing through it. And so maybe let’s end on that note, that folks are figuring out that this politics-speak, they’re seeing it for what it is—and, more importantly, for what it isn’t.

Phyllis Bennis: “What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war.”

PB: That’s exactly right, Janine, and I think the good news, if there is any in this extraordinarily devastating time of real genocide in real time in front of our eyes on an hourly basis, the good news is exactly as you say: More and more people in this country and globally are seeing through those false claims.

It’s a false claim that the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is not binding. It is binding. It’s a false claim that the South African charges at the International Court of Justice were meritless. They had all the merit in the world.

All of these claims are designed to distract us. It’s all a distraction. The change in language is a distraction.

What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war. That’s not the point here. The point is to stop the fighting, stop the slaughter, stop the denial of food and water and medicine, which is deliberately causing massive starvation on a level that all of the experts in international humanitarian crises admit is the worst they have ever seen—not in terms of ultimate numbers, because the population in Gaza is not very big, but in terms of the percentage of people. Never have we seen 100% of a population facing extreme hunger, with 55% facing immediate famine. This has never happened before, as long as the international humanitarian organizations have been tracking famines. It’s shocking.

And the fact that it is going on while we watch, with weapons we provide, that we pay for with our tax money, is finally reaching everybody in this country. More and more people are saying no, not in our name, not with our tax money, not anymore.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis. You can find her recent work on UN resolutions on Gaza on CommonDreams.org, as well as ips-dc.org.

Phyllis Bennis, we have to end it here for today, but of course we’ll stay in conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine.

The post ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’: CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 1, 2024

New Doc Traces Alex Jones’ Footprints on Our Post-Truth Landscape

To lose a child to violence is already one of the most traumatic things a human being can experience. To compound that by seeing those deaths made the center of a seemingly limitless conspiracy theory pushes that suffering to a level that is almost inconceivable.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones (HBO, 3/11/24)

The Truth vs. Alex Jones, a documentary released last month from HBO/MAX, immerses us in the immense pain—and equally momentous bravery—of the parents and other surviving relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, as they take on perhaps the most notorious conspiracy theorist of our age. Through exclusive courtroom footage and numerous emotionally vulnerable interviews, director Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland, Four Hours at the Capitol) brings the viewer inside the survivors’ legal efforts to force Alex Jones to face the consequences of his actions.

On the morning of December 14, 2012, a 20-year old man entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Over the course of about five minutes, he systematically slaughtered 26 people, mostly young children, then killed himself. He had murdered his mother earlier that day.

Through heart-wrenching interviews with first responders and forensic investigators, along with the recollections of the parents themselves, The Truth efficiently establishes the ruthless, inescapable reality of that rampage. However, the focus of the film is on Jones, the far-right talk radio host, and the court cases that the Newtown family members brought against him after six years of misery inflicted by him and his cohort of conspiracy-mongers.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones opens in the earlier days of his work, when he first rose to prominence through spinning conspiracy theories around the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Through a quick survey of clips from his career in the ensuing decade, Reed depicts Jones’ transformation from an Austin, Texas–based public access weirdo into a powerful right-wing influencer who profited handsomely off lies, typically through selling supplements that would supposedly protect viewers from the very fears he invokes.

For example, one sequence shows employees of Infowars, Jones’ video and audio programming network, being sent to the West Coast in search of radiation from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Back in the studio, Jones hawks anti-radiation snake oil. When his employees’ Geiger counters don’t detect high enough levels, he orders them to fabricate the evidence.

According to Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim executive director at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, these formative years for Jones and Infowars set the stage for the Sandy Hook conspiracies, but also the current conspiracy mindset that’s beset the United States as a whole in the era of QAnon.

Carroll Rivas told FAIR that “the early days of his claims around what happened in Oklahoma City, in Waco, and then his just continual drumbeat of lies about Jewish folks, about the Democratic Party, about families of mass shootings, about LGBTQ+ folks” created fertile ground for rampant disinformation. “Unfortunately, much of that damage, it has been done not only to those families, but it’s been done to American democracy.”

Jones’ paper terrorism

The Truth skillfully links these earlier lies—and the associated earnings from them—to Jones’ attacks on the Newtown families. Disinformation about previous tragedies being staged by the US government isn’t far afield from the tales he ultimately told about Sandy Hook—in a nutshell, that the shooting had been faked by actors and the media, led by the US government, in an effort to restrict or seize guns from everyday Americans.

Immediately after the Sandy Hook massacre, Jones and his allies at Infowars began dissecting news stories and other footage from the aftermath, frame by frame, in search of hidden meaning, just as they’d done after other national tragedies. But what might have been erroneously dismissed as eccentric after 9/11 became vicious when applied, unrelentingly, to grieving families.

Sandy Hook parents Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin.

We hear from survivors like Robbie Parker, father of six-year-old Emilie, and Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of Jesse Lewis, also six when he was killed, about how the continuous attacks on the reality of their grief ravaged their mental health, and made healing from the tragedy all but impossible. Eventually, the families felt they had no choice but to take the fight to court, in a pair of defamation cases launched in 2018. Both ended in default judgments against Jones three years later, and ultimately in record-breaking penalties against the broadcaster.

The bulk of The Truth takes place after both default judgments had been made against Jones. This took years of time-wasting and misinterpretation of the demands of the court and prosecutors, as he made a mockery of the discovery process. It’s rare for any case to end in default judgments, much less two of them, but it’s a sign of the extremity to which Jones pushed the court system, something that gets sped over to a degree in the documentary.

For Carroll Rivas, this behavior can be linked to Jones’ ties to other forms of right-wing extremism like the John Birch society and so-called “sovereign citizens” in the militia movement. “He’s situated within the anti-government movement and that movement has a long history of what some people refer to as ‘paper terrorism,’” she told FAIR. “Using government processes to purposely block the system, often because they don’t believe in the system at all.”

Carroll Rivas suggested Jones drew from pre-existing ideas within this movement when he built and promoted conspiracy theories around the shooting:

The idea that the government, particularly a government controlled by the Democratic Party in the US, or by what conspiracy theorists in the far-right would consider the left, that there are those actors that are somehow controlling a situation, either by manipulating the media or finance or by directly infiltrating and pretending to engage in mass violence, has been around for a long time.

She suggested a situation like the Newtown shooting conspiracy was all but inevitable in the atmosphere of mass violence that exists in the US.

Although it is difficult to encapsulate three years of delays into a feature-length documentary, some of the most infuriating moments in The Truth vs. Alex Jones show him making faces in the courtroom, openly mocking the intelligence of a Sandy Hook parent, or offering to let the judge in the Austin, Texas, trial get a closeup look at his fresh dental work. It gets so bad that even normally level-headed agents of the legal system, from lawyers to judges, break down in frustration at his behavior.

Though Jones normally presents himself as a political pundit, or even a documentarian, in a previous court case he attempted to rely on the defense that he’s merely a “performance artist” who is “playing a character” (NBC News, 4/17/17), and does not seriously believe anything he says. These toxic, clownish impulses are on full display in the film.

Beyond Sandy Hook

In one particularly bleak incident, Parker attempted to get out ahead of the rapidly spreading conspiracy theories about his daughter’s death by holding a press conference a day after the shooting. As the cameras rolled, Parker could be seen speaking in an aside to others as he approached the microphone, briefly laughing in response to something they said. Then, as he spoke about the murders, he inevitably began weeping.

Most people would say that it’s normal, even human, to feel a wide range of emotions after any tragedy. But for Jones and his followers, both paid employees and his millions of fans, this switch from brief chuckling to deep grieving signified that Parker was actually a “crisis actor“—in other words, that Parker was someone hired by the imaginary puppet masters of the tragedy to portray a grieving parent, rather than an actual person struggling to come to terms with unimaginable loss.

Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Carroll Rivas said belief in far-right conspiracy theories remains disturbingly commonplace, with the targets of the latest theories often involving other vulnerable groups—a March 22 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch shows that extremists now often falsely blame transgender people in the aftermath of mass shootings.

“Unfortunately, conspiratorial thinking is at a high right now in the US,” said Carroll Rivas, in reference to the SPLC’s research. She continued: “There are still folks who fully believe what Jones put out there about the Sandy Hook families falsely.”

She noted that so much of Jones’ output from this time period echoes in today’s American conspiracy mindset, and many of the same tactics continue to be used:

The manipulators will manipulate and they’ll take any situation, so when they see how successful they’ve been targeting the trans community, they’ll just take this already existing situation of mass shootings, prime the pump with a conspiracy therapy about it, and then whip it into this next level of targeting trans folks.

Dan Friesen, cohost of the Knowledge Fight podcast, which has devoted over 900 episodes to debunking and critically analyzing Jones’ output, told FAIR that The Truth vs. Alex Jones accurately depicts the coordinated attack that Jones launched on the Newtown families, and their bravery in fighting back, including bringing defamation cases against Jones. He highlighted the depiction of Parker’s story in the film as particularly moving.

“Over time, he had started to hate the press conference that he had given, which was, in a sense, a selfless act of trying to take heat off other grieving family members and honor his daughter,” Friesen recalled. However, the documentary suggests that, through telling his story and fighting back in court, he’d begun to “reclaim that piece of himself.”

“As much as there’s anything that can be uplifting about a story like this, I thought that was pretty impactful,” Friesen said.

Jones comeback tour?

Alex Jones (center) in court with his attorneys.

The documentary ends with a title card explaining that, despite the record-breaking defamation judgments against Jones, the courts have—thus far, anyway—been unable to collect any money from him or Infowars. Indeed, Bloomberg Law (9/19/23) reported that Jones is currently living a $100,000 month lifestyle.

Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in December of last year. Most observers believe this to be an attempt to avoid paying the Sandy Hook families, especially given his seemingly extravagant spending. According to court filings, Jones was making a $1.3 million annual salary from Free Speech prior to the bankruptcy, and this isn’t counting his other sources of income. The SPLC previously noted an anonymous $2 million donation to a Bitcoin wallet controlled by Jones.

However, Carroll Rivas stressed that, despite the delays, these types of legal actions can make a difference. “It takes up his time, his energy, and his money,” she said. The SPLC has a history of successfully fighting cases against hate groups in court, and she said, based on their experience, collecting from someone like Jones can be time-consuming, but that doesn’t mean that the courts won’t catch up with him eventually to take his remaining money or property.

“I hope that’s where this ends,” but, she admitted, “it will be a challenge.” She also said that the money spent on the case itself was money he couldn’t spend doing “other things that were harmful.”

Since the trial ended, Jones has been on something of an attempted comeback tour, including returning to the social network X/Twitter, where owner Elon Musk took time to chat with him and listen to his excuses about the Sandy Hook trials.

Unfortunately, as many people have pointed out, conspiracy theories are appealing because they are simple when compared to our complicated, messy real lives. And this allows Jones to spin simple but untrue stories about the trial itself: namely, that he never had his day in court, something he’s repeatedly claimed in encounters since.

“No matter how many times people say, ‘You had every opportunity to cooperate and play by the rules, you could have had the actual defamation trial’ … it’s all done away with by one guy yelling, ‘A judge decided I was guilty,’” Friesen said, summing up Jones’ current favorite talking points. The hours of depositions with Jones’ corporate representatives, the court requests he ignored, the unfulfilled judge’s orders, are “a lot more boring than [Jones’] pithy little turn of phrase.”

According to Mark Bankston, one of the lawyers for the families, millions of people believe, thanks to Jones, that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged. Friesen worried that, after years of disinformation from election lies to Covid denialism, there is the potential for similarly poisonous conspiracies to spread even further today when compared with 2012.

“I wonder how much more it would have spread if it had happened a couple of years later,” Friesen speculated. “I got chills thinking about how our information space has maybe even gotten worse.”

Friesen said the court case remains a weight on Jones’ reputation and his ability to do his work, but much remains to be seen, based on the disposition of his current bankruptcy trial.

“If he ends up getting incredibly lucky, then it’s been an emotionally difficult time for him, I imagine, but maybe he sails through it,” Friesen said. “Conversely, if the consequences end up being pretty severe, then maybe all of this will look different in hindsight.”

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March 29, 2024

Fox News Border Stats Distort Immigration Reality

Fox News‘ big scary number (2/20/24) includes millions of people who “entered the US”—then immediately left again.

7.3 million.

This is the sensational number of purported “illegal entries” into the US from the southern border that has been making its way through public discourse. Elon Musk propagated the statistic on X, formerly Twitter, in a February 21 post that was viewed 37 million times.

The New York Post (2/27/24) quoted it in support of Musk’s conspiratorial claims that Democrats are intentionally admitting undocumented migrants to garner votes. Newsweek (2/27/24) pointed to it to castigate the Biden administration’s purported failure to address border issues, and it appeared in a House Republican press release (2/22/24) denouncing “Biden’s far-left open border policies.”

The number comes from a Fox News article (2/20/24) written by Chris Pandolfo, which posits that “nearly 7.3 million” migrants have illegally entered the country over the course of the Biden administration.

On its face, the level of attention this has received makes sense, as it’s a massive number. In fact, it would be more than two-thirds of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the United States in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available (Pew Research Center, 11/16/23).

But how was this number calculated, and what does it actually mean? The answers reveal how Fox created a fear-mongering narrative that distorts the reality of what is actually occurring at the southern border.

Extreme narrative

Elon Musk (X, 2/21/24) hopes “the public is waking up” to the false claim that the Biden administration is “importing” 7 million migrants—and the absurd insinuation that any non-citizen can vote in any state’s elections.

Throughout his article, Pandolfo paints a picture of enormity, stressing the fact that 7.3 million is bigger than the population of most US states:

That is larger than the population of 36 US states, including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

At another point, he imagines all these migrants gathered together as their own city:

Were the number of illegal immigrants who entered the United States under President Biden gathered together to found a city, it would be the second-largest city in America after New York. And the total does not include an estimated additional 1.8 million known “gotaways” who evaded law enforcement, which would make it bigger than New York.

The image of these refugees coming together in the United States—and the use of the label “illegal”—suggests that these 7.3 million have entered without authorization and have stayed in the US, feeding directly into the right-wing Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Indeed, Musk’s quote tweet shared this commentary on the Fox article: “This is actually insane and it’s by design. Biden is importing so many illegals that it’s enough to replace conservative voters in many swing states.”

However, a careful reader might notice the distinction briefly made between “gotaways”—the estimated number of migrants who evaded the border patrol to successfully enter the US without authorization—and the initial 7.3 million. If “gotaways” are those who weren’t intercepted at the border, what exactly does that make the rest of them?

Misleading calculation

In his article, Pandolfo explains that the numbers Fox used to conduct their analysis were derived from the federal government’s reporting of border encounters:

That figure comes from US Customs and Border Protection, which has already reported 961,537 border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September. If the current pace of illegal immigration does not slow down, fiscal year 2024 will break last year’s record of 2,475,669 southwest border encounters—a number that by itself exceeds the population of New Mexico, a border state.

But this is extremely misleading: CBP “encounters” are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.

Indeed, of Fox‘s 7.3 million total, roughly 2.5 million were released into the country; the rest were turned back or placed in detention centers. A majority of those 2.5 million were families, and not all of them will stay long-term; these are simply the migrants who will have an opportunity to have their cases heard.

Border patrol categories

Title 42, a policy that denied refugees the right to seek asylum based on a national health emergency, was in effect until 2023 (NPR, 5/11/23).

The CBP calculates its border encounter number by adding together three categories: Title 8 apprehensions, Title 8 inadmissibles, and—through May 2023—Title 42 expulsions (NPR, 5/11/23).

Title 8 inadmissibles are people who present themselves at a port of entry without authorization to enter, i.e., without a visa; those who withdraw their application to enter and voluntarily leave; and those who attempt to enter legally but are determined by border agents to be inadmissible due to a range of reasons, including previous immigration infractions, a criminal background, lack of immunization, etc.

Title 8 apprehensions refer to people who are caught crossing the border without authorization, and are taken into custody by border patrol agents. Collectively, Title 8 encounters made up approximately 4.8 million of Fox’s 7.3 million number.

Both of these categories include many migrants seeking humanitarian protection. Migrants have a legal right to request asylum at a port of entry, so including these in a calculation of “illegal” crossings is not journalism but propaganda.

Migrants falling into the category of Title 8 encounters have the option of requesting a court hearing to have an immigration judge decide their fate—which results in them either being held in detention or allowed limited release into the country as they await their hearing. The number who will ultimately be allowed to stay long-term is nearly impossible to determine, as cases can take years to resolve.

Finally, Title 42 expulsions—derived from a 1944 public health law that allows curbs on migration in the interest of public health (AP, 5/12/23)—refers to migrants who were turned away during the Covid pandemic without being allowed to file for asylum. The policy, instituted by President Donald Trump in March 2020, continued well into the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 4/22/22). Biden declared an end to the Covid emergency in April 2023 (NPR, 4/11/23), resulting in an end to Title 42–based border restrictions the following month. These expulsions made up the remaining approximately 2.5 million CBP encounters over the course of the Biden administration.

Because these expulsions did not, unlike deportations, come with legal consequences for reentry, Title 42 produced a great many repeat attempts at crossing the border, inflating the totals. For instance, in the first nine months of the 2022 fiscal year, almost a quarter of the 1.7 million encounters reported by CBP were individuals who had already been stopped (Cronkite News, 7/18/22).

Migrants’ actual situations

Factcheck.org (2/27/24) found that Republicans “misleadingly suggested the number released into the country since Biden took office is much higher” than 2.5 million.

A comprehensive breakdown of the status of border crossers is difficult, as tallies are constantly in flux, numerical breakdowns are not up to date with one another, and backlogs on court cases leave many migrants in a limbo where the outcomes remain unsatisfyingly uncertain.

However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does provide some numbers from February 2021 through October 2023 (the latest month with available data on releases) that give a clearer idea of the situation of unauthorized migrants (FactCheck.org, 2/27/24).

According to that data—which measures a period in which border encounters were estimated at about 6.5 million—approximately 2.5 million of these migrants were actually released into the US. Most of these belong to families, to avoid holding children for extended periods in crowded detention facilities with adults.

These individuals are also selected with consideration of flight risk and their likelihood to present a danger to the local community, with the expectation that they will attend later immigration court hearings (Washington Post, 1/6/24). The majority of released migrants show up for their hearings (Politifacts, 5/17/22).

Meanwhile, about 2.8 million of the people who made up the encounters were stopped at the border and turned away over the same period—precisely what Fox‘s xenophobic audience thinks should be done with unauthorized migrants. This number jumps up to 3.7 million when accounting for total DHS repatriations, with the caveat that this could include some individuals who crossed the border before February 2021 and were later caught and deported by ICE.

Misdirected conversation

Attempts to cross the border rose sharply under Biden—as did the number of migrants turned back at the border (Washington Post, 2/11/24).

Pandolfo’s reporting serves to do little more than catastrophize the border situation as a means of playing into a narrative of, at best, lax enforcement under the Biden administration, and at worst the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This is despite the fact that five times the number of people have been expelled under Biden than were expelled under Trump, in part due to the increased volume of encounters (Washington Post, 2/11/24).

There is also the tendency to demonize these undocumented migrants by comparing them to invaders and pests, as well as linking them to violent crime (FAIR.org, 8/31/23). In fact, undocumented migrants commit such crimes at lower rates than the native-born population (Washington Post, 2/29/24).

None of this is to say that the recent high rate of border encounters isn’t an issue worth discussing. Many migrants come from countries like Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras—places deliberately destabilized by US policy (New Republic, 1/18/24; FAIR.org, 7/22/18). Our archaic, chronically neglected immigration system is overworked and underfunded, especially in regards to the courts and administrative infrastructure (PBS, 1/15/24). As long as legal avenues for entering the country are inaccessible, and the factors pushing migrants from their homes remain as dire as they are, high rates of unauthorized crossing attempts will persist.

All of this merits critical discussion. But when articles like Pandolfo’s vastly exaggerate the number of unauthorized migrants crossing the border—and remaining in the country—those valuable conversations fall to the wayside, exchanged for partisan posturing around a supposed crisis of undocumented migrants invading the country on the scale of entire metropolises.

Featured image: Fox News depiction (2/20/24) of migrants being sent out of the United States.

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March 29, 2024

Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal

BBC (3/28/24)

This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

Also on the show: As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour—these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
March 28, 2024

In Unhiring Ronna McDaniel, NBC Made the Right Move for the Wrong Reason

NBC created a stir when it announced on Friday that it had hired former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to be a paid on-air contributor. After three days of vocal pushback from star employees across the company’s outlets, the company heeded the criticism and let McDaniel go. While it’s a positive course correction, the tale as a whole is an inauspicious sign for how corporate media will deal with Donald Trump as the pivotal 2024 presidential election nears.

McDaniel, hand-picked by Trump to lead the RNC after his 2016 election, and ousted at his behest earlier this month (AP, 2/13/24), supported Trump’s false 2020 election claims and frequently attacked the legitimacy of the press corps, including NBC and MSNBC journalists (CNN, 3/22/24).

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (Rolling Stone (3/26/24) criticized her employers for “putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government.”

Those kinds of anti-democracy, anti-journalism positions apparently didn’t strike NBC leadership as any sort of obstacle to their own mission. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” explained NBC News senior VP Carrie Budoff Brown in an internal memo announcing the hiring (Fast Company, 3/27/24), touting McDaniel’s “insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party” (Washington Post, 3/23/24).

McDaniel made her first appearance as a paid contributor in an interview on NBC‘s Meet the Press (3/24/24) that had been booked before her hiring. Host Kristen Welker pressed McDaniel repeatedly on her past false claims, asking, “Why should people trust what you’re saying right now?” Subsequent shows on both NBC and MSNBC featured top anchors eviscerating their bosses’ hire, an unusual sight on corporate news.

By Tuesday night, NBC announced its reversal. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” wrote NBCUniversal chair Cesar Conde (Rolling Stone, 3/26/24). “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”

False principle of ‘balance’

It’s heartening that the pushback from NBC journalists forced management’s reversal, but it’s shameful that the network made the hiring decision in the first place. And Conde’s mea culpa suggested the company’s decision was fundamentally about quelling a workplace rebellion rather than recognizing a baseline journalistic standard of not rewarding liars with airtime.

Politico (3/25/24) reported that NBC executives liked McDaniel since she helped them “land a Republican presidential debate, a high priority at the network,” because “CNN had beat NBC in the race to host a Trump town hall.”

That shouldn’t be a surprise, because the primary standard corporate outlets adhere to is the one they see as boosting their bottom line: the false principle of “balance,” whereby outlets platform voices from “both sides” in order to claim freedom from bias, no matter how extreme or unreliable one side in particular might be.

It’s a principle that was likewise on display in mainstream coverage of the brouhaha. Politico‘s Ryan Lizza (3/25/24), for instance, wrote:

The on-air protests represent what could be a seminal moment in political media as news organizations continue to grapple with how to responsibly represent voices from the Trump right on their screens and in their pages without handing their platforms over to election deniers or bad faith actors who have attacked and attempted to discredit their own reporters.

Of course, what Politico presents as a legitimate dilemma that news outlets might conceivably overcome is in fact an impossibility, given that Trumpism is founded on the rejection of truth and honesty—something many in corporate media at least began to acknowledge after Trump’s failed January 6 insurrection (FAIR.org, 1/18/21).

But that was then; as Trump creeps back closer to power, corporate media are likewise slinking back to hedging their bets and prioritizing false balance over actual journalism.

Twisted picture

Republican strategist Alex Conant (Washington Post, 3/26/24) explained that networks face a “challenging pundit-supply issue”: “They have tried to find serious people coming out of Trumpworld and have not found a lot of appetite.”

The Washington Post (3/26/24) painted a similarly twisted picture:

The outrage over [McDaniel’s] appointment was indicative of the larger struggle television networks have faced in hiring pundits to offer a pro-Trump perspective without running afoul of both the audience and their own employees.

As did the New York Times (3/26/24):

The episode underscored the deeply partisan sphere in which news organizations are trying to operate — and the challenge of fairly representing conservative and pro-Trump viewpoints in their coverage, if major Republican Party figures like Ms. McDaniel are deemed unacceptable by viewers or colleagues.

The nation’s top newspapers would have readers believe that media outlets are trying to offer true journalism, but are thwarted by their “audience” and some less-enlightened members of the press corps, who would prefer to see things through a partisan lens. In fact, the way to “fairly represent” the views of a movement centered around denying the results of elections is to debunk them—not amplify them.

Not a difference of opinion

NBC has made several hires from the far right since the rise of Trump. Shortly after the 2016 election, the network brought on former Fox star Megyn Kelly (FAIR.org, 6/16/17). It added former Bush communications director Nicolle Wallace in 2017, former Fox anchor Shepard Smith in 2020, and former Mike Pence aide Marc Short just a month ago (Variety, 2/27/24).

Trump alum Mick Mulvaney had a “history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims” (Washington Post, 3/30/22), but CBS said he was “helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

In perhaps the most notorious example, CBS hired former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney in 2022. CBS co-president Neeraj Khemlani explained in a leaked recording (Washington Post, 3/30/22) that “getting access” to Republican elites was crucial, “because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.” That decision also faced backlash, though it didn’t prompt CBS to make the quick about-face NBC did. Still, Mulvaney made only infrequent appearances on the network, and was out within a year.

But none of these went quite so far as NBC‘s McDaniel’s hire, since none of those hires supported Trump’s fraudulent 2020 election claims.

And the outspoken NBC and MSNBC journalists who stood up to their bosses made clear that their beef was not with McDaniel’s partisan affiliation. Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski (3/25/24) said:

To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage. But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier.

Anchor Joy Reid (ReidOut, 3/25/24) agreed: “We welcome Republican voices. The reality is: This isn’t a difference of opinion. She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.”

So perhaps we have discovered a line that some corporate journalists, at least, are unwilling to cross—even if their bosses have less compunction. It suggests that far more journalists are going to have to stand up to those bosses regarding election coverage decisions if we hope to see anything like the kind of journalism we need to defend what little democracy we have left.

Research assistance: Xenia Gonikberg

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 27, 2024

‘Free Speech’ Fan Elon Musk Enlists State Allies to Silence Critics

I wrote last November (FAIR.org, 11/22/23) about how Twitter owner Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters—alleging the group’s research “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” Musk’s social media platform—was an episode of a right-wing corporate media mogul using his wealth to crush free speech.

“Much appreciated!” declared Elon Musk in response to the Missouri attorney general’s probe (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24). “Media Matters is doing everything it can to undermine the First Amendment. Truly an evil organization.”

Now Musk’s friends in government are joining his efforts to silence his critics. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing Media Matters to demand internal documents, because he, like Musk, believes the group “manipulated Twitter‘s algorithm to create a report showing advertisements for normal companies on the platform appeared next to not-normal content, or what Bailey calls ‘contrived controversial posts,’” causing advertisers to flee (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24).

Bailey said in a statement (3/25/24):

My office has reason to believe Media Matters engaged in fraudulent activities to solicit donations from Missourians to intimidate advertisers into leaving X, the last social media platform committed to free speech in America….

Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they will not be defrauded in the process.

Bailey clearly wants to get into the fray that has caught up with right-wing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton (11/20/23) announced he was launching an investigation into “Media Matters, a radical anti-free speech organization.” He cited Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act as grounds for looking into whether Media Matters “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com“:

We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.

As the government of Texas threatened to bring charges against a nonprofit organization for publishing a study of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, Musk posted the attorney general’s press release on X (11/20/23) and gloated, “Fraud has both civil and criminal penalties.”

McCarthyist witch hunt

It’s easy to write off Bailey and Paxton as partisan hacks who are using the power of the state as a public relations tool to win adulation in MAGA-land. But Musk’s ability to use the partisan prosecutors and the courts to engage in a McCarthyist witch hunt against the corporation’s critics is highly concerning.

A federal judge dismissed Musk’s complaint that the Center for Countering Digital Hate had “embarked on a scare campaign” (Verge, 3/25/24).

At around the same time as Bailey announced his crusade, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (Verge, 3/25/24), saying that the company suing CCDH for researching hate speech on the site was “about punishing the defendants for their speech.” It’s good news that a sensible judge can protect free speech. But how long can that last against one of the world’s richest people, who has made it clear he has an agenda to silence critics, and the collaboration of powerful officials?

Former President Donald Trump left his mark on the judiciary, appointing “more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight” (Pew Research, 1/13/21). And Bailey and Paxton are not the only state attorneys general who are aligned with Trump and his political positions; Paxton was able to get 16 others to join with him in petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election (New York Times, 12/9/20).

Rather than turning Twitter into an open free-speech utopia, Musk’s administration of Twitter has been marked by aggressive censorship (Al Jazeera, 5/2/23). Reporters Without Borders (10/26/23) said that Musk’s removal of guardrails against disinformation has been so disastrous that it “regards X as the embodiment of the threat that online platforms pose to democracies.” After the National Labor Relations Board said that Musk’s SpaceX fired workers critical of him (Bloomberg, 1/3/24), the company argued that the NLRB’s structure was unconstitutional (Reuters, 2/15/24).

Musk is clearly inclined to use courts and friendly officials to censor his critics, as well as to shred labor rights. If Trump is elected later this year—which is entirely possible (CNN, 3/9/24)—Musk will have the ability to fuse his desire and resources to shut down critics with emboldened far-right government allies.

Bailey’s outrageous statement might seem silly and destined for the same fate as Musk’s case against the CCDH, but it portends a highly chilling environment if the courts and government agencies fall further into the hands of the right.

The post ‘Free Speech’ Fan Elon Musk Enlists State Allies to Silence Critics appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 26, 2024

‘In Even the Best Coverage There Is No Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’CounterSpin interview with Evlondo Cooper on climate coverage

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper about climate coverage for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Media Matters (3/14/24)

Janine Jackson: Climate disruption is, of course, one of the most disastrous phenomena of today’s life, affecting every corner of the globe. It’s also one of the most addressable. We know what causes it, we know what meaningful intervention would entail. So it’s a human-made tragedy unfolding in real time before our eyes.

To understate wildly, we need to be talking about it, learning about it, hearing about it urgently, which is why the results of our next guest’s research are so alarming. I’ll just spoil it: Broadcast news coverage of the climate crisis is going down.

Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome to CounterSpin, Evlondo Cooper.

Evlondo Cooper: Thank you for having me. I’m excited about our conversation today.

JJ: We’re talking about the latest of Media Matters’ annual studies of climate crisis coverage. First of all, just tell us briefly what media you are looking at in these studies.

EC: So we’re looking at corporate broadcast network coverage. That’s ABC, CBS and NBC. And for the Sunday morning shows, we also include Fox Broadcasting—Fox News Sunday.

JJ: All right. And then, for context, this decline in coverage that you found in the most recent study, that’s down from very little to even less.

Media Matters (3/14/24)

EC: Yeah, so a little context: 2021 and 2022 were both record years for climate coverage, and that coverage was a little bit more than 1%. This year, we saw a 25% decrease from 2022, which brought coverage to a little bit less than 1%. We want to encourage more coverage, but even in the years where they were doing phenomenal, it was only about 1% of total coverage. And so this retrenchment by approximately 25% in 2023 is not a welcome sign, especially in a year where we saw record catastrophic extreme weather events, and scientists are predicting that 2024 might be even worse than ’23.

JJ: Let’s break out some of the things that you found. We’re talking about such small numbers—when you say 1%, that’s 1% of all of the broadcast coverage; of their stories, 1% were devoted to the climate crisis. But we’ve seen, there’s little things within it. For example, we are hearing more from actual climate scientists?

EC: That was a very encouraging sign, where this year we saw 41 climate scientists appeared, which was 10% of the featured guests in 2023, and that’s up from 4% in 2022. So in terms of quality of coverage, I think we’re seeing improvements. We’re seeing a lot of the work being done by dedicated climate correspondents, and meteorologists who are including climate coverage as part of their weather reports and their own correspondents’ segments, a bigger part of their reporting.

So there are some encouraging signs. I think what concerns us is that these improvements, while important and necessary and appreciated, are not keeping up with the escalating scale of climate change.

Media Matters (3/14/24)

JJ: It’s just not appropriate to the seriousness of the topic. And then another thing is, you could say the dominance of white men in the conversation, which I know is another finding, that’s just kind of par for the elite media course; when folks are talked to, they are overwhelmingly white men. But it might bear some relation to what you’re seeing as an underrepresentation of climate-impacted populations, looking at folks at the sharp end of climate disruption. That’s something you also consider.

EC: Yeah, we look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.

So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

CBS (7/17/23)

Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”

EC: Totally.

JJ: And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”

EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”

But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.

CNN (3/3/23)

JJ: And then take it to your next story about Congress, or your next story about funding, and connect those dots.

EC: Exactly. I mean, climate is too often siloed. So you could see a really great segment, for instance, on the Willow Project, at the top of the hour—and this is on cable, but the example remains—and then later in the hour, you saw a story about an extreme weather event. But those things aren’t connected, they’re siloed.

And so a key to improving coverage in an immediate way would be to understand that the climate crisis is the background for a range of issues, socioeconomic, political. Begin incorporating climate coverage in a much broader swath of stories that, whether you know it or not, indirectly or directly, are being impacted by global warming.

JJ: It’s almost as though corporate media have decided that another horrible disaster due to climate change, while it’s a story, it’s basically now like a dog-bites-man story. And if they aren’t going to explore these other angles, well, then there really isn’t anything to report until the next drought or the next mudslide. And that’s just a world away from what appropriate, fearless, future-believing journalism would be doing right now.

Evlondo Cooper: “It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action.”

EC: It’s out of step, right? Pull up the poll showing bipartisan support for government climate action, because, whether people know it or not, as far as the science, —and there’s some deniers out there, but anecdotally, people know something is happening, something is changing in their lives. We’re seeing record-breaking things that no one’s ever experienced, and they want the government to do something about it.

And so it’s important to cover extreme weather and to cover these catastrophes. And I know there’s a range of thought out there that says if you’re just focusing on devastating impacts, it could dampen public action. But to me, to your point, report on it and connect it to solutions, empower people to call their congressperson, their representative, their senator, to vote in ways that have local impacts to deal with the local climate impacts.

It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action in their own lives, and to galvanize public support.

And the public wants it. The public is asking for this. So I think just being responsive to what these polls are showing would be a way to immediately improve the way that they cover climate change right now.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters for America. You can find this work and much else at MediaMatters.org. Evlondo Cooper, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EC: Thank you for having me.

The post ‘In Even the Best Coverage There Is No Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’ CounterSpin interview with Evlondo Cooper on climate coverage appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 25, 2024

‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’

Janine Jackson interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his documentary Stripped for Parts for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Documentary filmmakers don’t start when the camera rolls. The work involves not just gathering knowledge on a topic, but establishing relationships—sometimes with people who have no reason to trust that a camera in their face will lead to anything good for them.

Likewise, documentary filmmakers are not done when the film is finished, especially in the media-everywhere-all-the-time world we live in now. Simply creating something is not the same as guiding it to who might want or need to see it, to helping it have impact.

Among his other work, Rick Goldsmith is the filmmaker behind two important films about journalism in the United States: Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. His newest film is the third in this focused trilogy; it’s called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. And he joins us now to talk about it. He’s joining us from Oakland, California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rick Goldsmith.

Rick Goldsmith: Hi, Janine, thanks so much for having me on the show.

JJ: Smart as we all are nowadays, I think the idea of capitalism as market-based, which seems to mean based on human choices—that’s been sold so well as a story that there are people thinking, well, as much as I relied on my local newspaper, I guess it was just losing so much money that it wasn’t a sustainable business. And so it had to die.

The layoffs, the closures, what many people see as news media moving from “far from perfect” to “what the hell,” is presented as sad but somehow inevitable. And I think this film intervenes in that storyline. But was there a particular spark or a particular question that set you off to make Stripped for Parts?

FAIR.org (4/11/22)

RG: There was an event that happened about six years ago, now, and it was called the Denver Rebellion. And what happened was the newspaper men and women at the Denver Post kind of rose up against their owner, who was a hedge fund. And it was newly understood that hedge funds had a really bad effect on journalism. And they criticized their own owners, they took it upon themselves. And this kind of decline in local journalism was noticed, first by the journalists themselves. And they were the canaries in the coal mine to tell the story to everybody else.

So when I found out about this uprising, the Denver Rebellion, there were several things that jumped out at me. One was, why would somebody try to intentionally run down journalism? And two, the hedge funds were taking on a business that was failing: Why would they do that, and how would they make money? And then, three, was, here were the journalists who usually don’t even report on their own industry, and they were the ones telling the story. So for me, that was rich enough to get into it and say, “What the heck is going on here? And can I add something to this story?”

JJ: I think that’s especially interesting, because accounts of what Amazon is doing, or what the auto industry is doing, they’re almost always about what the owners and shareholders are doing. And if it’s a story about the workers, that’s going to be another day, on another page. And it’s especially, maybe, true in media, in that, as you’ve just said, workers, reporters, photographers usually don’t feel that they can or should speak as workers. For a journalist, “making yourself the story,” so-called, is anathema. So it wasn’t so much…what you’re saying, you didn’t have to get reporters to talk. Reporters were like, “No, we want to get this story out.”

RG: That’s right. And that was unique about their story, but I still had to—I think that the thing you said at the top, about gaining their trust, I think was really, really important. And maybe it was because of my background, and maybe it was just because of the approach, or maybe it was because of the passion and the anger that they were feeling at the time at being downsized by this hedge fund, that they were open to talking to me. And I think those first interviews after the Denver Rebellion were very, very rich, because it was so fresh in their mind, and they were so fired up about it.

JJ: What did you learn? If you had to explain to someone, why would a profit-interested corporation buy a paper and destroy it, essentially, run it into the ground? How does that make sense? Does that make sense?

Rick Goldsmith: “They could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press…and they’ve already made their money back.”

RG: Well, it makes sense if you understand what this particular hedge fund, and many like it, are in the business of. And the key phrase here is “distressed asset investing,” which is maybe a kind of Wall Streetish term. But what it means is they could buy something on the cheap that was a failing business, and then figure out what their assets were. And like a used car that is basically junk, they could strip it for parts.

And in this case, it was usually the real estate. The newsroom itself was downtown, was centrally located, and they could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press and move the printing operations out of town, and they’ve already made their money back, and then everything else is gravy.

So then the next key step is, let’s cut the staff, because we don’t need these—Heath Freeman, who’s the president of Alden Global Capital, he walked into the newsroom and he famously said, “What do all these people do?” So he had a certain disdain for the people that worked for the newspapers, but it was a gleam in his eye, because he said, “We can make some money, we can make lots of money out of this.” And that’s exactly what they did.

JJ: And the public facing part of it, when Alden Global Capital or any hedge fund takes over a paper, they never say, “We’re going to strip this for parts.” That’s never the PR move. It’s, in fact, grotesque, because it’s often, “We’re going to save this failing outlet.”

RG: That’s exactly right. And in fact, after I got into the business, I mentioned the Denver Rebellion. Well, there were many, many events that then unfolded in the several years that followed. And one was that Alden Global Capital went after Gannett, which was the largest publicly owned newspaper chain in the country. USA Today was their flagship paper, but they had local newspapers all around the country. And Alden Global Capital, that was in their materials to the shareholders: “We saved newspapers.”

The Nation (2/8/19)

Unfortunately for them, at the time, people like Julie Reynolds, who was an investigative reporter that’s highlighted in our film, had done a lot of reporting, and by now she’s done over a hundred articles just on Alden Global Capital and newspapers. And what Alden didn’t see coming was they were going to lose the public relations battle, and they tried to take over Gannett in 2019, and they failed.

Now, there were other events that followed that, that made it not so great for the public, but at that time, that was a big victory for journalists, and it was because now the news about Alden Global Capital and what they were about was out in the public, and they couldn’t just do their machinations behind closed doors.

JJ: That sunshine or that transparency is, maybe it’s the baseline or the bottom line, but it’s a necessary starting point. Clearly, this work is of particular meaning for people who work in journalism, sure, but also for everybody who sees and cares about the effects of media coverage on the whole range of issues that shape our lives, and on the relationship, as we at FAIR always talk about, between the business of media and journalism’s actual and potential societal impact.

So I want to ask you about the Impact Campaign. What is the work that is going with this film that’s different than just having a series of screenings of the film around the country? What do you hope to be adding with the Impact Campaign?

RG: Our Impact Campaign is just underway, and we’re going to be in New York in this coming week with a couple of screenings at the Firehouse Cinema DCTV on Tuesday, March 26 and Wednesday, March 27. And we’re going to be following that up with going to Minneapolis and Santa Cruz and Vancouver, Washington, and later Baltimore, New England, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, all over the country.

What’s the point of all that? Well, the film itself is a jumping off point for discussion about journalism. And we show, not only the causes of the hedge fund takeover of newspapers, which is massive in this country, but also some of the solutions that are happening, with startups—there’s over 400 nonprofit newspapers, with newsrooms from two to three people to maybe ten or 20 people. Not exactly taking the place of newspapers, but very, very substantial. There’s also movements to get public funding of local journalism.

And so we have the showings of the film followed by Q&A with, generally, I might be there, either in person or virtually, and maybe somebody from the local community who’s been paying attention to the local journalism crisis, talking about it, and interacting with the audience.

And what can you do? It might be getting in touch with your local representative, because some legislation is addressing this problem, or it’s expanding your knowledge of what are the local journalism outlets in your community that you’re not even thinking about? And it’s a way of getting people who are from the community and the journalists from that community to interact, get them in the same room, get them talking.

And I think it’s only by raising the public consciousness, and raising the amount of discussion about this crisis in local journalism, and how it affects democracy, that we’re going to find our way out of it. And the solutions in each community are somewhat different, because of the particulars of that community. And I think that’s actually a wonderful thing, because then the solutions become somewhat locally generated.

JJ: And how can folks learn more about this, or maybe even bring it to their town?

RG: Great question. Come to our website, StrippedForPartsFilm.com, just like it sounds. If you somehow have trouble reaching it, just Stripped for Parts and google it. You’ll get to our website. You can get in touch with us if you want to help arrange a screening in your community. We are here, and we have the ways to make that happen. And we can do that with you and with your help.

JJ: All right, then; we’ve been speaking with documentary filmmaker Rick Goldsmith. You can learn more about the film Stripped for Parts, and the Impact Campaign that goes with it, at StrippedForPartsFilm.com. Thank you so much, Rick Goldsmith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RG: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out to me.

The post ‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 22, 2024

What the Chuck? Murdoch Defends Bibi From Senate Leader

The United States government has historically exercised a lot of opinions when it comes to who should be in charge of Middle Eastern countries. Former President Barack Obama on several occasions called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “to go” in order to end that country’s civil war (Washington Post, 8/18/11; BBC, 9/28/15; Wall Street Journal, 11/19/15).

Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (CBS, 10/20/11) joked about Libyan leader of Muammar Qaddafi’s summary execution, saying of the US role in the Libyan civil war, “We came, we saw, he died.” The US has battered the Iranian economy with sanctions (Al Jazeera, 3/2/23) and has supported anti-government protests there (VoA, 12/20/22).

When it came to Obama’s policy on ousting Assad, Wall Street Journal (5/31/13) editors lamented that they were “beginning to wonder if he means it.” They said (10/24/11) of Qaddafi that he shouldn’t be “pitied for the manner of his death,” and that Libyans have “earned their celebrations.” They said “President Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and even the Arab League deserve credit as well” for militarily aiding Libyan rebels.

A bylined op-ed in the Journal (6/11/18) not only celebrated the idea of regime change in Iran, but rewrote the history of the 1953 CIA-sponsored Iranian coup as ultimately the fault of a democratically elected leader who governed poorly in the eyes of the West.

‘An obstacle to peace’

The New York Times (3/19/24) reported that the Republican Jewish Coalition said that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”

One might expect, therefore, that the Journal would not be shocked to learn that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish American in US politics, had called for new Israeli elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (New York Times, 3/19/24).

Schumer, after all, didn’t call for an anti-government mob to remove Netanyahu from the Knesset and send him into exile. No, he just suggested it would be in Israel’s interest to hold elections to replace Israel’s longest-serving leader, whom Schumer described as “an obstacle to peace.”

Schumer’s view shouldn’t be surprising, because Jewish American voters are still overwhelmingly liberal (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6/26/23), while in recent decades Israel’s political center of gravity has moved far to the right. Polling shows that Netanyahu is deeply unpopular among Americans as a whole (Jerusalem Post, 1/8/24).

Yet the Journal—along with the Murdoch empire’s other main US newspaper, the New York Post—professed outrage at the idea of an American official intervening in the politics of another country.

‘Unwelcome interference’

The Wall Street Journal opinion page (3/14/24) expressed umbrage that Schumer would engage in such “unwelcome interference” in a democracy, which it argued was entirely unwarranted:

Precisely because Israel is a democracy, accountability for Mr. Netanyahu is baked in. The prime minister at this moment represents a broad consensus in Israeli society that the country can’t afford to allow Hamas to continue its violent and corrupt control of Gaza after the horrors unleashed on October 7.

Of course, the primary form of accountability to voters in a democracy comes with elections, so if Netanyahu truly represented a broad consensus in Israeli society, why should he or the Journal fear them?

In fact, a large majority of Israelis want early elections—a recent poll put the number at 71% (Haaretz, 2/6/24). Prior to October 7, Israelis regularly took to the streets to protest the Netanyahu government’s anti-democratic judicial overhaul.

And let’s not forget that Israel isn’t really a “democracy” at all, by the standard definition of the word: The approximately 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, over whom the Israeli government exercises its authority, have no say in that governance, and the 2 million Palestinians in Israel are relegated to second-class citizenship (FAIR.org, 5/16/23). Leading human rights groups have used the word “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s domination of Palestinians (B’Tselem, 1/12/21; Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Amnesty International, 2/1/22).

The Journal board (3/18/24) followed up to complain that President Joe Biden “has also endorsed Sen. Chuck Schumer’s extraordinary declaration last week that Israelis must depose the elected Mr. Netanyahu.” The word choices here—”deposing” an “elected” leader—paint an early election as an anti-democratic coup.

Counter that, for example, with how an op-ed at the Murdoch-owned New York Post (1/15/20) said of Iran, just weeks after the US military assassinated the country’s top general:

Can US policy afford to tip the internal balance against the mullahs, even as Trump tries to extricate us from the region? The answer is yes. These goals—regime change in Iran and ending endless wars—are, in fact, complementary.

‘Wrong to raise the issue at all’

Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/20/24) complained that Schumer “treats Israel differently from other American allies by threatening to intervene in their domestic democratic politics”—as if the United States hasn’t overthrown the governments of US allies (e.g., South Vietnam, 1963; Australia, 1975; Ukraine, 2014) when they weren’t to its liking.

Bylined opinion pieces in the Journal agreed that Schumer was overstepping his authority by encouraging Israel to hold an election. Journal columnist William Galston (3/19/20) said Schumer “was wrong to raise the issue at all,” because Israel “is a sovereign nation with robust if imperfect democratic institutions,” rather than a “banana republic.” (In “banana republics”—that is, poor countries with nonwhite populations—US meddling is apparently unobjectionable.)

In another Journal op-ed (3/20/24), Joe Lieberman, a former Connecticut senator and one-time Democratic vice presidential candidate, castigated Schumer for his position. The Middle East hawk said:

This is a shocking statement that treats Israel differently from other American allies by threatening to intervene in their domestic democratic politics. In making American support for Israel conditional, Mr. Schumer harms Israel’s credibility among its allies and enemies alike.

Mr. Schumer’s statement will have every other democratic ally of the US worrying that America may try to bully our way into its domestic politics.

For anyone who knows about the pro-Israel lobby’s influence over US elections (Guardian, 5/17/22), or the history of the US toppling democratically elected leaders in Chile, Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, this objection comes off as both ignorant and hypocritical

‘Placating the anti-Israel left’

In the looking-glass world of the New York Post (3/14/24), Israelis are solidly behind Netanyahu, Americans enthusiastically back Israel’s war, and Gazans are “suffering far less than in most Mideast wars.”

Another worry Murdoch outlets expressed was that the US might change its foreign policy in response to US public opinion. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/14/24) worried that Schumer was “placating the anti-Israel left in his party,” which reflects a “political neurosis developing among Democrats,” in which the party wants “Israel to ‘win’ the war against Hamas in a way that would minimize the anger of the anti-Israel left” inside and outside of the party.

In its follow-up editorial about Biden’s support for Schumer’s comments, the Journal (3/18/24) similarly warned that the president was “catering to the anti-Israel left without alienating the bulk of US voters who would find it unconscionable to turn on the Israeli people in wartime.”

Meanwhile, the New York Post editorial board (3/14/24) wrote that the once-reliably pro-Israel Democrat is “now echoing Hamas’ line,” because a faction of “Arab-Americans and most Muslim voters, plus the rising number of hard lefties” within the party, is growing in influence.

If we can get past their blasé conflation of protesting the killing of innocent Palestinians with the agenda of Hamas, the Post and Journal editorial boards aren’t wrong: Protests against the massacre of Palestinians, outspoken pro-peace lawmakers, “uncommitted” votes in Democratic primaries and voters generally turning against Israeli policy are all putting pressure on Democratic leadership.

That’s the kind of “democracy” Murdoch’s papers can’t get behind.

The post What the Chuck? Murdoch Defends Bibi From Senate Leader appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 22, 2024

Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’—Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine

Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.

Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.

Linguistic gymnastics

This New York Times headline (2/29/24) was described as “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”

On the day of the massacre, the New York Times (2/29/24) published this contrivance:

“As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll”

It was met with ridicule as it slid across online platforms. Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/1/24), author and research director at the Iranian American Council, called the piece of work “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”

Another Times headline (2/29/24) read, “Deaths of Gazans Hungry for Food Prompt Fresh Calls for Ceasefire.” Nima Shirazi, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed (Twitter, 3/1/24), noted that “the New York Times just can’t bring itself to write clear headlines when Israeli war crimes are involved.” Shirazi offered this revision: “Israel Slaughters Starving People as It Continues Committing Genocide.”

Professor Jason Hickel (Twitter, 2/29/24), along with Mint Press‘s Alan MacLeod (2/29/24), flagged the use of the neologism “food aid–related deaths” when it turned up in a Guardian headline (2/29/24): “Biden Says Gaza Food Aid–Related Deaths Complicate Ceasefire Talks.” MacLeod noted, “Virtually the entire Western media pretend they don’t know who just carried out a massacre of 100+ starving civilians.”

Linguistic gymnastics—a longstanding plague pervading Western media coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 8/22/23)—were so popular in news headlines and reporting that Caitlin Johnstone (Consortium News, 3/1/24) compiled a list of them, adding “chaotic incident” (CNN, 2/29/24) and “chaotic aid delivery turns deadly” (Washington Post, 2/29/24) to those already mentioned.

Sana Saeed, media critic for Al Jazeera, decoded the latter kind of construction for AJ+ (3/29/24), arguing that such passive language has been used “consistently to sanitize the violence that a powerful state is unleashing against civilian populations.”

As the genocide enters its sixth month, media analysts, investigative reporters and social media users have become adept at recognizing pro-Israeli contortions and patterns of language that justify Israel’s war on Gaza. This has become an essential aspect in exposing Israel’s genocide.

‘Anarchy rules in Gaza’

Economist (2/29/24): “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.”

The Economist (2/29/24), under the headline, “A New Tragedy Shows Anarchy Rules in Gaza: A Shooting and Stampede Kill 122 and Injure Hundreds,” went into the worst pro-Israel spin, with reporting that seemed to blame Palestinians for their own murders. Parroting Israeli press directives, the piece claimed Palestinians were killed by “trampling” each other in their own “stampede.”

The piece was written in literary prose: “Death descended on a coastal road in Gaza,” the reporter (not present at the scene) wrote. Then “catastrophe befell an aid convoy,” as if it merely happened upon bad luck.

Then the writer made a prediction: “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.” That’s likely to come true, especially when major media outlets abdicate their responsibility for evaluating claims.

Timeline of changing denials

Even in special “Verify” mode, the BBC (3/1/24) can’t bring itself to say in a headline who it was that killed Gazans.

Many other writers and journalists have documented the string of vacillating Israeli statements that help explain the contorted reporting. Al Jazeera reporter Willem Marx (Twitter, 3/1/24) traced a timeline of how the Israeli military changed its story over the course of the day.

The IDF began by claiming there had been trampling and pushing that led to injuries around the aid truck. Then, hungry Palestinians had “threatened their soldiers,” or “appeared in a threatening manner,” so the IDF shot at them. Later that day, Israeli officials claimed there were two separate incidents, one that involved trampling and the other that led to shooting. By the end of the day, they alleged only to have provided support to a humanitarian convoy, and that no shots were fired at all by the military.

When the BBC (3/1/24) verified that a video released by the Israeli military exhibited four unexplained breaks in the footage and was therefore invalid, the outlet still used the passive voice, referring in the headline to “Gazans Killed Around Aid Convoy.” One sentence of the detailed, confused article quoted Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah: “Israelis purposefully fired at the men…. They were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour.” Earlier, however, Awadeyah was problematized when identified “as a journalist for Al Mayadeen, a Lebanon-based news station whose broadcasts are sympathetic to groups fighting Israel.”

Independent and international media

“Israel’s use of food as a weapon of war reaches new heights,” Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported.

If we compare corporate outlets to independent media, in which reporting was based on ground sources, humanitarian actors and aid workers, we find very different content.

Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul (2/29/24), who was at the scene of the massacre, said that “after opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies. It is a massacre, on top of the starvation threatening citizens in Gaza.”

EuroMed staff (2/29/24) on the scene confirmed that the Israeli military had fired on starving Palestinians. EuroMed’s findings were summarized in a videotape by Palestinian news agency Quds News Network and posted by the Palestine Information Center (3/4/24).

Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported details of the massacre from eyewitness accounts. One survivor recounted how an Israeli checkpoint “split the crowd in two,” preventing those who had entered the checkpoint from passing back to the northern side. Then Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowd. International observers visited the injured survivors at al-Shifa’ Hospital, “confirming that the majority of wounds from the hundreds of injured people were due to live ammunition.”

In context of famine

Middle East Eye (2/29/24) put IDF claims in the context of a Gaza “on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade.”

Reporting in the alternative press also placed the massacre within the context of the rapidly increasing famine in Gaza.

The headline for the Electronic Intifada (2/29/24) read, “Palestinians Seeking Food Aid Killed as Israel Starves Gaza.” The outlet said an “engineered famine has taken hold in Gaza, with people resorting to eating wild plants with little nutritional value and animal feed to survive.”

Middle East Eye’s reporting (2/29/24) included the dire condition Palestinians are currently facing: “Much of Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade, according to the UN and other humanitarian organizations.”

The day of the massacre, Democracy Now! (2/29/24) opened its broadcast with a clear statement and the relevant context: “Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as UN Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza.” Its first guest, UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri, said, “Every single person in Gaza is hungry.” He accused Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. He emphasized that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe:

At this point I’m running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.

Common Dreams (3/3/24) reported on Israel’s obstruction of aid convoys, and cited UNICEF on the deaths of children who

died of starvation and dehydration at a hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces continue to obstruct and attack aid convoys, fueling desperation across the territory…. People are hungry, exhausted and traumatized. Many are clinging to life.

It concluded, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”

In the days before the massacre, numerous outlets had been documenting the growing famine looming over Gaza. This is the material independent media made use of for contextualizing the massacre.

The New York Times, on the other hand, put the massacre into an entirely different context. A piece (3/2/24) headlined “Disastrous Convey Was Part of New Israeli Effort for More Aid in Gaza,” cited as confirmation “Western diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” It said that international aid groups “suspended operations” because of “rising lawlessness,” as well as Israel’s refusal to “greenlight aid trucks.” It blamed starving Gazans by claiming that aid convoys had been looted either by “civilians fearing starvation” or by “organized gangs.”

‘How is this not a bigger story?’

“How is this not a bigger story?” one observer asked of this Al Jazeera report (3/6/24).

As Common Dreams and Mondoweiss reported, the flour massacre was not the first time the IDF killed starving Palestinians, and it would not be the last. As Mondoweiss (3/4/24) put it: “In less than a week, Israel has committed several massacres against the hungry. On Sunday, March 3, Israel bombed an aid convoy, killing seven people.”

Quds News Network (3/2/24) reported that Israel targeted hungry civilians again at Al Rasheed Street in northern Gaza while they were waiting for humanitarian aid. And Quds (3/4/24) reposted Al Jazeera footage that captured the moments when Israel’s military opened fire at other hungry Gazans, this time at the Al Kuwait roundabout, as they looked for food aid.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24) continues to document the murders of Palestinians desperate for aid as they come under Israeli fire. On a longer videotape, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch says these attacks violate ICJ orders:

The idea that these people are being killed as they scavenge for meager rations of food is just appalling, and is a reminder why there must be international immediate action to prevent further mass atrocities.

Following the Al Jazeera report, Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/6/24) expressed dismay:

Israeli attacks on Palestinians waiting for or attempting to get aid have repeatedly happened this week, yet there has been no media coverage since the massacre that killed over 100 people. Israel is attacking civilians it’s deliberately starving. How is this not a bigger story?

Normalizing starvation and massacres

The Floutist (11/16/23) addresses “the perversion of language that the defense of Israel’s violence requires.”

Sana Saeed (Twitter, 3/4/24) observed:

So just to be clear: Much like how Israel normalized attacking and destroying hospitals, and it was accepted by the international community, Israel is now normalizing shooting and killing the people it is starving as they seek food.

Media have failed to inform the US public on the horrific conditions experienced by starving civilians in Gaza. They blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, covering for the Israeli military as it carried out a massacre. They further dehumanized Palestinians by characterizing starving people as an unruly mob who trampled one another.

To paraphrase Patrick Lawrence (Floutist, 11/16/23) on the distortion of language in defense of Israel’s violence against Palestinians: It corrupts our public discourse, our public space, and altogether our ability to think clearly. This corruption is as vital as US bombs to the Israeli genocide against Palestine: Without these verbal distortions that justify, distract, deny and consume corporate information spaces, the genocide could not be carried out.

The post Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’—Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 22, 2024

Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts

KXAS (3/19/24)

This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat.

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
March 21, 2024

Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges

South Africa on December 29 presented a historic case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the highest court in the world. In an 84-page lawsuit, South Africa asserted that Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza—following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners—constitutes genocide. So far, more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered, while over 71,000 have been injured in Israeli attacks.

Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law.

Thin early coverage

In the Wall Street Journal (12/29/23), the initial accusation of genocide got second billing even in the subhead.

FAIR used the Nexis news database and WSJ.com to identify every article discussing the genocide case published in the print editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for one month, from the announcement of the case on December 29 through January 28, two days after the ICJ’s preliminary ruling.

Under international law, genocide is one of the gravest charges that can be brought against a state. Since its 1948 ratification by the UN, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has only been presented to the ICJ on a handful of occasions, and the historic nature of the complaint was not lost on its applicant: “South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention.”

Unfortunately, the two most widely circulating newspapers in the US cannot say the same. In the lead-up to the hearing (12/29/23–1/10/24), the New York Times only published three articles focused on the case (1/8/24, 1/9/24, 1/10/24), while another Times piece (1/10/24) included a brief mention of the genocide charges.

The Wall Street Journal ran no pieces focused on the charges prior to the hearing. The Journal‘s only mention of the genocide case in the pre-trial period came in a broader article about the war (12/29/23), which included six paragraphs about South Africa’s application. The paper did not reference the case again until the trial began.

‘Without any basis in fact’

The New York Times (1/11/24) seemed to feel that the accusation of genocide was so serious that it should offer readers as few clues as possible as to whether it was true or not.

During the two-day hearing, each paper ran two articles about it in their print editions. Each published an overview of the case (New York Times, 1/11/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/11/24). For their second piece, the New York Times (1/11/24) looked at both Israeli and Palestinian reactions, while the Journal (1/12/24) focused only on Israeli reactions; the one Palestinian it quoted was identified as an Israeli citizen.

After the trial’s January 12 conclusion, and through January 27, two days after the court’s announcement of its preliminary ruling, the Times ran five more articles in its print edition primarily about the case, while the Journal ran only one.

Experts have said that “all countries have a stake” in South Africa’s application, and that the case “has broad implications” (OHCHR, 1/11/24), but the papers’ thin coverage suggested to their readership that it is of little consequence.

US news outlets’ dismissive reaction to the hearing was consistent with the Israeli narrative surrounding the genocide charges. Israel’s denunciations of Pretoria’s accusation were widely reported—they were “blood libel” (CNBC, 12/30/23); “nonsense, lies and evil spirit” (The Hill, 1/31/23); and “outrageous” (Jerusalem Post, 1/5/24). US officials followed suit, brushing off the allegations as “meritless” (The Hill, 1/9/24) and “without any basis in fact whatsoever” (VoA, 1/3/24).

So while the ICJ case was met with spirited support from the global human rights community, establishment media’s initial choice to treat it as unnewsworthy may have convinced some audiences to believe what Israel and its allies want them to believe—that South Africa’s application has no basis in reality.

Uneven sourcing

The coverage the two papers did offer largely perpetuated US media’s longstanding tradition of skewing pro-Israel (FAIR.org, 8/22/23; Intercept, 1/9/24 ). Though Palestinians are at the center of the case, they often seemed to be an afterthought in the newspapers' coverage of it.

The papers were mirror images in terms of their frequency of quoted pro-Israeli and pro–South African positions in their coverage. The Wall Street Journal’s three articles that focused on the ICJ case included 23 quoted sources. Of these, 11 (48%) expressed or supported Israeli government positions, and 8 (35%) expressed or supported South African government positions. (Four were not clearly aligned with either party.) In the Times' 10 articles focused on the case, the paper featured 65 quoted sources. Those taking a clear position on one side or the other expressed or supported the South African position more often, with 30 sources (46%), compared to 23 expressing or supporting the Israeli stance (35%). (The remainder did not have a discernible stance.)

Palestinian voices, however, were marginalized in both papers. Fourteen of the 65 Times sources were Palestinian (22%); 22 (34%) were Israeli. Five of its 10 articles on the genocide case that appeared in print quoted no Palestinian sources. By contrast, only one—a piece about South African domestic politics (1/27/24)—quoted no Israeli sources.

Of the Journal's 23 sources, five (22%) were Palestinian, and 9 (39%) were Israeli. Two of its articles were evenly balanced between Palestinian and Israeli sources, while one (1/12/24) quoted five Israelis and only one Palestinian—the citizen of Israel mentioned above.

The lack of Palestinian representation is consistent with establishment media trends, which often neglect Palestinian voices in Israel/Palestine coverage. In fact, a 2018 study conducted by 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, found that, in five major US newspapers’ coverage of Israel/Palestine between 1967 and 2017, Israeli sources were cited 2.5 times more often than Palestinian ones.

Consequently, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s media resource guide advises reporters: “Interview Palestinians. Your story is always incomplete without them."

Unchallenged Israeli talking points

The only independent legal expert quoted in this New York Times article (1/10/24) suggested that it was impossible to say whether a genocide was going on while there was still time to stop it.

While the New York Times' sourcing was somewhat more balanced, that did not reflect the absence of a pro-Israel skew. The paper failed at the basic task of evaluating arguments, reducing the grave charge of genocide to an unresolvable he said/she said back-and-forth.

In the Times' most extensive pre-trial article (1/1o/24), Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner and Johannesburg bureau chief John Eligon provided an overview of the hearing. Of 11 quoted sources, only a single independent legal expert was included: William Schabas of Middlesex University, London, who averred that it would be months before South Africa assembled all of its evidence, and "only then can we really assess the full strength of the South African case." Meanwhile, four Israeli sources and a US official were quoted in support of Israel, against three South African sources and one Palestinian source.

The Times piece also uncritically presented easily refutable Israeli claims about the legality of the IDF military campaign in Gaza:

Israel’s military insists that it is prosecuting the war in line with international law. Officials point to the millions of messages, sent by various means, telling Gaza’s civilians to evacuate to safer areas ahead of bombings, and say they are constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza.

Israel's insistence that it follows international law is contradicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, all of which have documented evidence of war crimes committed by Israel in this conflict, as well as in past conflicts. Journalists' job is to hold the powerful to account, not to simply relay their claims, no matter how flimsy. Yet the Times offered no hint of pushback to Israel's assertions.

Moreover, those “millions of messages” are often inaccessible to Gazans under rocket fire. The designated “safe zones” are usually announced on social media posts or via leaflets dropped over Gaza containing QR codes to maps (Guardian, 12/2/23). As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, “It is unclear how those residing in Gaza would access the map without electricity and amid recurrent telecommunications cuts.” Since October 7, Israel has purposely cut Gaza’s electricity and internet supply—another violation of international law (Human Rights Watch, 10/21/23; Al Jazeera, 12/4/23).

Even if Gazans make their way to the designated zones, there is no guarantee that they will find safety; many of the areas that Israel allotted as civilian safe zones have been targeted and bombed by the army (New York Times, 12/21/23). As UNICEF spokesperson, James Elder, told the BBC (12/5/23): “There are no safe zones in Gaza.”

Unscrutinized statements

The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) provided no questioning of the claim that "Israel’s inherent right to defend itself" required the killing of thousands of children.

The idea that the Israeli military is “constantly working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza” is also patently incorrect. A Human Rights Watch report (12/18/23) found that

Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

Nearly the exact same paragraph about Israel sending "millions of messages" and "constantly working to increase the amount of aid" appeared in the Times the next day (1/11/24), without any analysis.

Another Times piece, by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley (1/12/24), offered a brief explanation of the accusations leveled by South Africa, followed by Israel's rebuttal that it is taking “significant precautions to protect civilians.” Again, the Times offered no evaluation of such claims.

The Wall Street Journal (1/12/24) advanced a similar assertion from Tal Becker, chief lawyer for Israel’s Foreign Ministry: “Israel…recognizes its obligation to conduct military operations in line with international humanitarian law, which requires efforts to minimize civilian casualties.”

With no scrutiny of Israeli officials’ statements, US news becomes little more than a bullhorn for government propaganda.

Research assistance: Xenia Gonikberg, Phillip HoSang

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